TIKHET’s mixtape suite wanders, drifts, stops, starts, and shifts course like it’s following the flicker of an old TV screen. Sepalot and Angela Aux throw a decade’s worth of record-digging into a single project, and somehow, it holds together without feeling like a museum exhibit. Tikhet are the duo Sepalot and Angela Aux. “Smoke Rings” opens with sluggish, boom-bap drums that feel dug up from a Cypress Hill session. Angela Aux’s voice floats through the fog, deadpan yet weightless: “I spent a long time coming that I must be kind of late.” It’s an immediate tone-setter. Nothing is rushed, and nothing is wasted. “So Unique” swings in the opposite direction. The bassline moves, the beat hits sharper, and there’s a half-smirk buried in the mix. It’s got the restless energy of a track that could have been cut between studio sessions with The Hives and Fatboy Slim. You can hear the splice marks in the best way. Each track moves like it’s been picked from a different shelf. Britpop guitar hooks slide into broken trip-hop rhythms. Krautrock pulses under nu-jazz embellishments. “Right Now I Can See” shuffles along like a lost Beck demo, stripped of any excess. “I buried my brain in el Segundo” is a personal favourite, a bouncy funky little number. In contrast, “final morning sun” is a gorgeous lo-fi pop tune that expands with jazzy flute instrumentation. There’s no clear structure, no formula. The album moves with instinct, like two people passing records back and forth, daring each other to take the next idea further. It’s not seamless, but it’s not meant to be. TIKHET lets the seams show, and that’s the point. mixtape suite is about the jump cuts, the detours, the way one track crashes into the next before you’ve caught your breath. Some records feel like statements. This one feels like motion.