Oh, the romance of Los Angeles: the neon haze, the endless boulevards, the echo of surf meeting smog. But Stuart Argabright and Afterafter's "LA Drones" isn't interested in the "Hollywood" version of the city; it takes us on a meandering, cassette-laden joyride through the decaying glamour of the "real" LA - the surreal, the slightly apocalyptic, and the utterly hypnotic.

Recorded over a few days in the summer of 2021, "LA Drones" feels like an audio scrapbook of time and space colliding - a fever dream pieced together from half-speed cassette loops, washed-out memories, and found sound that spills out like a half-remembered trip up the Pacific Coast Highway. Argabright, a legend of the no-wave scene (anyone remember Ike Yard?), and Stefan Scott Nelson work their alchemy on layers of degraded tape, slowing the world down until everything takes on that familiar Lynchian edge: recognizable, yet just off enough to be unsettling.

Opener “Malibu Waves” clocks in at nearly eight minutes and wastes no time setting the mood. It starts with a slow, haunting pulse that could be the ocean itself, lapping against the remains of some forgotten beachside shack. There’s something almost tactile about the way the sound disintegrates and reforms - like pressing your ear against a shell only to hear ghosts instead of the sea. It’s hypnotic, sure, but not in a relaxing way - more like the kind of hypnotic where you’re unsure whether you’re about to fall asleep or step into a nightmare.

Then comes “Replicants Skip A Rope”, which tips its hat to "Blade Runner" and the whole cyberpunk mythology LA has cultivated for itself. At 11 minutes, it’s a sprawling, pitch-shifted journey into an urban dreamscape, where everything feels slowed down, like an audio mirage playing tricks on your sense of time. This is the kind of track where you could swear you've heard these sounds before - except you haven’t, not like this. The layers blur and mutate, as if the tape itself is melting in the LA sun. You can almost hear the Replicants dancing just out of sight, skipping ropes in some back alley where reality has long since taken a vacation.

On “Mirror Canyon Sunset”, the duo plays with the notion of nostalgia - not the saccharine kind, but the kind where the colors are too vivid, the memories distorted by time. It’s the musical equivalent of watching the sunset through a cracked windshield, the golden hour marred by static and flickers of interference. There’s a warmth to the track, but it's a strange, unsettling warmth - the kind you get when you realize the past was never quite what you thought it was.

And then there’s the behemoth: “Barefoot Dawn - Part I Monster Mash Parade // Part II Sentries Chatter”. If you’ve made it this far into the album, this 13-minute odyssey is your reward. It opens like a parade of mutants marching down some forgotten stretch of Broadway, an audio collage that feels as if it’s been pieced together from a half-remembered Halloween party in another dimension. By the time we transition into “Sentries Chatter”, the soundscape has thinned out, but the tension remains - chatter, static, the occasional burst of what might be music, or might just be the wind playing tricks on your ears.

If all of this sounds pretentious - well, yeah, "LA Drones" "is" pretentious. But in the best possible way. It’s the kind of pretentiousness that doesn’t care if you’re on board or not. It’s not here to hold your hand or spoon-feed you catchy hooks. This is music for people who want to get lost, who want to sink into the sonic equivalent of a William Gibson novel and not care about making it out the other side.

There’s something wonderfully defiant about that. In a world where so much music is content to play it safe, "LA Drones" revels in its weirdness, its warped and twisted sense of space and time. It’s an album for dreamers, insomniacs, and anyone who’s ever wandered through LA at 3 a.m., wondering if the city is actually alive or if it’s just an elaborate hallucination. If you’re in the mood for something that feels like it was recorded in the shadows of a city that’s forgotten how to sleep, then dive in. Just don’t be surprised if you never quite find your way out.