Paired with fantastic artwork, each release aligns more closely with their conceptual vision than the previous. Today we take a look at their latest 'Pentiment LP' release by Malcuth and Facutum, a slight detour from Drum & Bass we’ve come to expect from the label into fresh territories of cinematic halftime, a refreshing take on a halftime aesthetic that continues to influence so many. In conversation, these two have a bit to tell us about the release and we also check in with artist MK Art to hear his insights about the creative process behind the cover art for this release.

Hey fellas, thanks for taking the time to chat today. How is it that you both met and started making music together?

Our pleasure man, what’s better than talking about the stuff you love? I actually met Valér (who used to be one part of Facutum) at an alternative festival, where he played a really interesting project mixing electronic music (Dubstep and Experimental, his own production) and poetry. We chatted after the show and immediately understood we had a lot to say, potentially even create together. He introduced me to Filip and soon after came the idea to do the Airbnb trip, to do a challenge of making a beat over the weekend. That worked out well, and it was the basis of our first tune 'Restless' which was later released on Open Outlets. We have worked together on a lot of projects since then. I think that was more than 2.5 years back because we were creating 'Restless' for like half a year and waited another year for a release. Super stoked, that Culprate picked that up.

How’d you hook up with Sinful Maze? How do you feel like you fit on their roster with this Halftime release on a primarily Drum & Bass oriented label?

I think I sent a demo of our track 'Deep Breath' to Meph a while back. I was looking for a label but the problem in the Czech Republic is that we don’t have anybody who releases this kind of stuff and for our first release it's a hard sell. Our friend Meph, who did the mastering for our release and is someone I knew before from playing shows and I booked him for an event in Prague before so we knew each other and I sent him this and he said Mark and I are starting off a new label, maybe we can fit this in. Mark Sin is open-minded with these kinds of things and he loved it actually. I think it's perfect because Sinful Maze doesn’t really have boundaries like what you can release there but most of the releases are Drum & Bass because that's how the

Czech and the Slovakian scene is working at the moment. I don’t think there are any Halftime producers from the Czech Republic out there who do what we do so I think we are gonna hear more stuff like us in the future from Sinful Maze but at the moment yes, it's only us. But still, I think it's really privileged to be working there because there are so many talented guys, the label is so open, and we are not hindered by any creative decisions and Mark just loves what we do we’re super proud to work with them. The label is focused on sound design and new ideas and that's the most important thing to us and that's why we click.

I love the halftime aesthetic you guys put out with your music. Can you tell me about your influences? Is it artists that are big in halftime like Ivy Lab, Razat, Balatron, etc?

All those artists yes definitely inspire the beats but it's mostly Lorn that is a big influence in the feeling and development for us. He’s more minimal but it's kind of slow burn that gets under your skin and we’ll be trying more of that in the future.

I think you all achieved that especially in the opening track 'Pentiment' as well as 'Velvet', it bleeds through the whole album in the breakdown of each track. Makes for a really distinct and mature release, not just bangers!

I’m glad that you hear it because that's what we were aiming for. We didn’t want to go full Lorn copycat but we wanted to have that feeling there. It's called ‘Pentiment’ but we think the word ‘sentiment’ isn’t so far from that, it could be a play on these words and that feeling. It's also this lo-fi feeling and the Retrowave kind of feel from the old VHS tapes, the crackling of the vinyl and the tapes from the 90s and the blue screens. All these kinds of things that you lost and they come back to you somewhere you don’t even know. I think that's what music can sometimes be about, it's like the pieces of a puzzle which come together sometimes. And in this instance, it was layers that we put over each other and one of the layers is definitely this kind of feeling which is hard to describe but I think Lorn has it and we definitely got closer to it than we thought we would. A lot of producers today are missing some of that patience and humbleness which needs to be executed in this kind of release. Sometimes just throwing out ideas you love all of them, but you don’t know which works and we were super critical about this and listened to it with more people. In that sense, we really took our time with it. It wasn’t finished until it was finished. We were a little pressured into the timeline at the end of it but most of the process was no timelines, just made it work. Just a little over a year.

Very cool! I saw you all recently had an opening show for the debut of 'Pentiment' with the Sinful Maze crew. How did that go?

To be honest we were not sure how it would turn out. Not the best date and a flu pandemic going around. But yeah people showed up and everybody had such a positive reaction. We go our own way with the playlist, skipping between genres, playing unusual, heavy, slow, and moody stuff. Really happy that some people here seem to really appreciate what we do and that's just exactly what we needed. Overall the reactions to the LP are amazing, some of our heroes putting kind words into the comments, that's just surreal.

Alongside your own tracks, can you tell me a bit more about what other kind of music you two were playing at your live show? I’m intrigued! Was it more drum and bass or halftime oriented?

We actually tried to steer away from the drum and bass because everybody does that here. I like drum and bass a lot but with this kind of set, we kind of want to show it’s not all about the drum and bass. So it was mostly Halftime but what we did was we started at 130 bpm and we ended at 174. Our intro for example; was 128 or 130 and the second track was Ivy Lab. Actually, we played their track 'Tea Cup' which is kind of Halftime. And from that we went to breakbeat, I threw The Prodigy's 'Firestarter' into the set, the original one you know. Then we go to dubstep and the last half of the set was all half-step. Ivy Lab, Razat, Balatron, Traka, yunis, Chrizpy Chris, Chee, most of the Yuku catalogue, big influences. Usually, when I play shows I play Drum & Bass and then Halftime but with this project, we used Breakbeat and House to break the energy then brought it back to Halftime. The producers before us were playing it, then the guys after us were playing Drum & Bass so we fit in a natural progression.

Very cool! Didn’t you all have Soldier MC with you all for the live show? The MC featured on Zodiac?

Yes! He also did the track live with us at the release party and that was a blast. Soldier MC was introduced to us through Jef from YUKU. Really fun dude to work with, very communicative in the process, and flowed well with us, he had incredible attention to detail and a really humble way of communicating ideas. We loved that. He was happy to work with us, adjusting the flow and placement of vocals and vice/versa he worked with us and gave us feedback as well. The man is just starting out and there’s so much potential in him.

Tell us about these limited edition vinyl pressings that were available at the show.

The vinyl is DIY made by Losna Dubplates and the artwork by MK Art. The vinyl is produced in a classic way by cutting directly into a PVC disk. They were first meant to be a gift to a chosen few, who made the album happen, but it seems quite a few people want to get their hands on them, so we decided to give it a shot and make a proper batch. Watch our socials if you are interested. It will still be strictly limited.

That’s awesome to hear. Will be on the lookout for that for sure. I’ve got some questions about some tracks, can you tell me where the vocal samples from' Deceit' and 'Oathbreaker' come from?

The idea of the vocals came from Notequal. I think we heard an earlier version with the sound with a different type of beat from them, and we met at a festival and we wanted to work on something together. They were up to finish the track with us. Funnily enough, we had some trouble with the vocal because some guy from the same label actually used it on a release. We were working on the track and at the same time, there was a Drum & Bass release that used the same hook. So we tried to use different vocals, I think the sample is from Splice and edited like usual. I think we tried 5 or 6 other vocals and nothing worked that well around it. In the end, we were like fuck it, this is the way the track is supposed to be. And so we came back to this and made it solid. The thing is that the original idea was kind of harder but I think that the vocal kind of deserved this more mellow approach and the hard part we left for the 2nd drop. The clap instead of the snare, more sub-bass combined with the melody, is the direction we took the track in the end and I think we made the right decision. I know on 'Velvet', the closing track of the album, we used some samples from the show Mindhunter on it as well.

Very cool! I really enjoyed 'Third Sun' also, it has such a nice head nod swagger to it.

Yeah, I’m kind of interested to see if people are actually going to play 'Third Sun' because I don’t know if it fits the dance floor but I could be wrong I guess. The first half is very synoptic and then goes the head-nodding thing. I hope it's gonna work, we actually weren’t able to play this to a crowd yet. We don’t know how the people will react to this, it's got this kind of movie - matrix - soundtrack vibe so we’ll see.

Can you speak about the creative process behind your tracks and production? We’ve been interested in the instrumentation and guitar that we’ve heard on the album.

Did I do some guitars here? I did actually! I did the guitar playing on 'Third Sun' and in Oathbreaker there’s a sample we used that we found somewhere from some 80s prog-rock band but I don’t remember exactly where we took that from. But it's kind of a hybrid between beats and sampling kind of a thing, where hip hop started I guess. You take a sample and make it work in the context of a beat and that's kind of what’s missing a lot from a lot of production artists because now it's mostly synthesized and I think it's missing this color. I call it color because its a way of expressing or dealing with texture and the quality of sound because the sound is kind of lo-fi sometimes but it has these qualities of imperfections which add to the feeling and we mash this up together with sound design which we do mostly in Serum, Massive X, Operator, and Absynth and also a Korg Minilogue which is actually a hardware synth we used a lot in a lot of the tracks. So it's kind of a combination of as many approaches as we could get our hands on and also we had recorded some percussion for 'The Serpent' with a shaker. That sound is actually where the idea for the cobra sound in that tune came from.

Do you two have any other music projects in the works?

We found that we wanted to have something funny for the show so we’re working on a bootleg of Racked by Tommy Cash because we really like how it sounds quite different from the seriousness of this album. I’ve completed a couple drum and bass tracks but I think I will wait until Christmas or so to put these out. And I think Filip is finishing a single as well. But aside from that, I’ll be slowing down a bit because I have my own live project called Simulacrum, and we’re gonna be opening at a festival here, I play live guitar there so I’ll be preparing the next two weeks for my set for that. It's synced with visualizations so it's a different project. In terms of producing maybe a little slower now but I am not stopping any time soon.

Is that like a band?

It's kind of a band. I do music and synths and the guy with me does visuals as he’s written his own visualization software. If you view the promo for the 'Pentiment' album, I did that actually. We use hundreds of different clips from different movies, backgrounds, artists, we put them together then we match it with the music kind of like Noisia outer edges but different. With the visuals and music, there’s a sort of natural connection with me which is also kind of the movie or soundtrack-ish aspect of the music that we do.

And that really shows in this latest release. Thanks so much for your time, it's been great chatting. Good luck with everything, can’t wait to hear more soon.

Always a real pleasure talking about the things you love. Thanks for taking the time and interest to chat with us. Cheers!

Michal Kaštovský aka MK Art’s beatific vision is a distinct feature of numerous Sinful Maze album covers, adding much to the label's overall aesthetic. His fine-concept art digital illustrations depict crucial moments of demonic beings engaged with their surreal and hellish environments, creating an engaging figurative narrative to accompany the mysterious soundscapes of each release. Always pushing the boundaries of his technical ability while exploring different methods of expressing inner worlds, MK’s visionary work brings a marvelous allegorical quality to Sinful Maze, demonstrating visually as well as sonically that they have something unique to offer to the drum and bass community. We are very excited to get some insight into the creative process of the Háj ve Slezsku-Czech based visionary behind the artwork.

I started to paint the artwork a few months before I even knew about the Pentiment LP, and totally without any vision. The main reason for the challenge, and to prove to myself that I can paint something that includes more multiple figures, has a difficult perspective and contains an interesting color palette. This is happening very often to me at the beginning stages of making artwork, starting off with little to no vision, and encouraging myself with a little 'ego pumping' - a pretty weak form of self-motivating - I know haha!

So I made a scene in 3D to know how the shadows land on figures and started to paint. When I finished the figures and did a basic background I had totally no idea what to do next. . . Not to mention that selecting my color palette was a battlefield by itself. I got stuck. I desperately needed to add some meaning to the artwork to finish it so I contacted Mark and told him about it. He later showed it to Malcuth and Facutum who liked the sketch and chose it for Pentiment LP with a note that they want me to put vector lines somewhere in there. Perfect, I finally had the motivation to finish the artwork!

I’m a big fan of mythologies and monsters and find similarities in mythologies all around the world including the bible. During this time, I was studying the Old Testament and wanted to incorporate some of what I learned into this piece. In addition to this, my fellow SFM artist Elena Vatrushkina made a sick artwork for the 'Timeless EP' that took my interest. I really liked how she works with eyes in her artwork so I took inspiration from that and tried to mix it in with the bible themes. Higher beings should be always watching over the lower ones, right? That’s what I depicted here. Later I got stuck once again because I had no idea what to do with the vector lines and the artwork still did not seem finished. I tried to design clothes, add wings but it simply did not belong there… Long story short I, fortunately, figured it out and thanks to Mark's feedback I made the final details and finally finished the painting. As you can see, for a long time I was struggling a lot and that is only because I cannot keep or even make one coherent/good vision that the painting should be based on. Thankfully talking with Mark along with the feedback and encouragement from Malcuth and Facutum gave me the inspiration and direction I needed to complete the piece.