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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.

Kaspi & Stride is a new project from Justin Tripp, best known as one half of the Georgia equation. Leanings has its origins in rigorous yet laid back studio sessions, dual personal practice sensibilities that seem to get at Tripp’s creative ethos as well as any descriptors might. The material here was born out of collaborative studio sessions with multi-instrumentalist Jimy Seitang (Conga Square/Stygian Stride) - the “Stride” of K&S. The music from these sessions has been reworked and recontextualized by Tripp to form the eight tracks found on the record. These compositions are heady and diverse, anchored by infectious drum patterns and intricate electronics, capably occupying a somewhat hard to define space between “club ready” and “home listening.”

“Vishing” throbs with a wide-eyed intensity, infused with the type of deceptively rudimentary synth stabs and bass swells that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Hype Williams record. With contributions from Mary Lattimore and Jon Leland, “Kaptoxa” charts a more ethereal, if no less dizzying, course. Indeed, this is an album that navigates dense, tactile passages and airy, celestial planes with aplomb, making a case for Tripp’s prowess as both composer and arranger with equal priority. The most important thing is to keep moving.

Amsterdam might be susceptible to grey skies and rain as any other, but cup your ear to the music flowing out of the Dutch capital, and another story emerges. The Mauskovic Dance Band are a prime example of an act who have been dialing up the sunshine over the river Amstel in recent years.On Shadance Hall, their first release of 2020, they concoct a tantalising brew of no-wave, psych rock, cumbia, power dub and numerous other colourful shades of global grooves.

No stranger to Dekmantel as one of half of electro-grouping Bruxas, Nicola Mauskovic leads his percussive troupe through a heavy, trippy, disco fiesta with this, their first debut on Dekmantel Records.
The Mauskovic Dance Band’s epic sonic journey on Shadance Hall began deep in the Welsh valleys. Partnering dusty drum machines alongside phat layers of congas, assorted bric-a-brac of percussive tools, and distortion-soaked guitars, Mauskovic’s ensemble suspend the tempo and turn up the grooves. on this soundsystem-inspired, post-punk odyssey. The resulting soundsystem-inspired concoctions are a mixture of 130bpmbeats (‘Ventura Phase’), Jah Wobble-influenced bass rhythms (‘Squeeze Dogs’) and Carnival-ready soca-jams (‘Theorie Amerikaan’).

Taken back to Amsterdam’s famed Electric Monkey Studio (a favourite for Ghanian great Ebo Taylor and Dutch youngbloods Jungle By Night alike, Mauskovic teamed up with engineer Kasper Frenkel to mix down the record. Here the two acted as Mad Professors, experimenting with the recordings and making multiple versions of each track by creating tape loops, bouncing the audio back and forth and layering the resulting recordings in waves of reverb and echo. In classic dub style, the band ended up with dub edits, rich in space echo, reverb, crush, and dub-goodness, completing the second half of Shadance Hall like a funky palindrome. It rounds off an expressive EP steeped in musical history, bursting with inventiveness, projected at the listener as a maze of influences to get lost within.