What’s most exciting about the LA-based artists, like Oscar McClure, matthewdavid, and others, on the Leaving Records roster is their seemingly insatiable urge to turn their hometown’s electronic music scene on its head. While McClure focuses primarily on the textures of his beat music and label head David writes tunes sounding like an R&B hit submerged underwater, yuk. takes a more straightforward route with his compositions, but he makes them sound like they come from a time and place you’ve never even heard of. In the same vein as Flying Lotus or Shlohmo, “adept-ation for Dev”—and the rest of the album it comes from, A D W A—is a Dilla-referencing beat suite set among birdsong, inundated with vinyl crackle, washed over with lo-fi fuzz, and compressed into oblivion. This production doesn’t just sound like it came from another era; it might have been made on another planet.

04 adept-ation for Dev

04 adept-ation for Dev