D.K.’s adroit aerobic mystic suite, ’The Ancient Kingdom’ is inscribed to vinyl for the first time following its now sought-after tape release during the ill-feted summer of 2020. South East Asian-inspired beatdown, rude steppers, and dancehall-adjacent psychedelia that’s recommended listening if you’re into Shackleton, DJ Python, Horsepower Productions, Roska…

Hustling a handful of rhythmelodic nuggets informed by his Vietnamese heritage, the Paris-based Dang-Khoa Chau aka D.K. delivers in a sublime and slinky style that has become his hallmark over the course of four solo albums and a clutch of singles since 2014. Returning to Good Morning Tapes, site of his superb and already hard to find ‘The Goddess Is Dancing’, he reprises that record’s outernational psychedelic themes thru five ‘floor-ready cuts working adjacent to 100bpm dembow dancehall, beatdown house, and ancient-futurist UKFunky.

With bags of disciplined swagger, D.K. bends disparate styles to his will in each bit. On a slow, humid yet deft flex he rolls out reverberant gamelan patterns punctuated by slicing 808 rimshots in ‘Po Nagar Towers’, and follows a shimmering sort of dembow motion with fluttering lysergic motifs in ‘Cham Dance’, and a rudely dubbed-out variation ‘Five Wisdoms’, whereas the others keeping the tempo needle flicking upwards, as in the needlepoint stepper ‘The Ancient Kingdom’ recalling vintage Horsepower Productions, and in the pendulous UKF parallels of ‘Assault From Java’ recalling classic Roska.