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“A Typical Night in the Pit” is a collection of new music by Los Angeles’ Nick Malkin. It is an album that finds the artist absorbed in the density and chaos of the urban complex. It is unquestionably an “LA album”, but not the LA of hi-fi listening bars and twinkling, Instagram-ready New Age. Rather, Malkin navigates something more akin to the LA found in the films of Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph — overheated, tense, hazy, frayed — with blue-lit, nocturnal compositions that at times recall Mark Isham’s noirish scores for those subversive (anti-)Hollywood pictures. Enlisting a revolving cast of LA experimentalists, Malkin has assembled a record that is as chameleonic as it is cohesive, offering up vignettes ranging from the skewed MIDI-jazz of “Sixth Street Conversation” to the skulking menace of “Estacionamiento Privado,” before giving way to the wide-eyed, cloudy closer “View From Two Perspectives.” C’mon, let’s go in here and get outta this heat.

Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

Iggy goes West! Soda Gong welcomes back Kansas City-based musician Iggy Romeu with his latest collection as Mister Water Wet. "Cold Clay from the Middle West" is a (characteristically) sharp left turn from his last two records, with Romeu offering up a surprising and addictive melange of crackpot Americana and smoky noir beat science. “Cold Clay Suite” opens the record, a five-part ride into the sunset that features Cooder-esque guitars, cat-gut fiddle, horse-hoof percussion, stadium organs, penny whistle, and bleary-eyed polysynth ruminations, among sundry other ephemera. Multi-instrumentalist Will Yates, known to most as Memotone, shows up three times on the album, lending clarinet, keys, guitars, banjo, sarangi, and vibraphone to these kaleidoscopic productions. It’s a wild ride of a record akin to following a dotted bridleway on a crumpled old map, marvelously variegated and stitched together as only MWW knows how. Get along, now.