Kuna Maze is a French producer who’s been putting out music for the better part of this decade. The last time we heard from him was just back in May, when he collaborated with Nikitch to release an EP called Cake. Now he comes right back with a tribute to his most immediate influences with an EP called 2009.

It only feels appropriate as we get ready to say goodbye to the Low End Theory, which helped foster the Los Angeles beat scene along with other adjacent acts with a weekly series of shows since 2006, that we get an EP that seeks to pay tribute to that influence. While he cites a few other influences in the mid to late 2000s that helped inspire him as a musician, as you listen to 2009, it becomes fairly clear that the sounds of L.A. from this time period had a pretty profound impact on a young Kuna Maze. Over the course of five songs, Kuna Maze constructs some really complex and intimate beats, ones that seem at first like they are going to be fairly straightforward downtempo beats. In studying the L.A. scene, he learned how to build these really beautiful, warm beats, and then complicate them by switching up rhythmic patterns and developing the melody so that it’s memorable, but never becomes complacent. The result is an EP that not only pays its respects, but is completely enjoyable in its own right. It will sound really fantastic on some hot summer nights.

2009 is a tough project to pull off, since instrumental tributes aren’t necessarily as obvious as vocal ones, but Kuna Maze is thoughtful enough in his approach to make some music that hints at what made instrumental electronic music so interesting during that time period, while also making it his own. That’s no easy feat, but he pull it off here.