LTF is a producer from Omsk, Russia. He released his first album, Light the Fuse, on Black Milk Music back in 2015. Since that time, he’s developed a reputation for making these cinematic instrumental hip hop records sampling from regional music unfamiliar to a lot of North American and Western European listeners. While the regionality sparked from his roots in Eastern Europe, he never specifically sought to make hip hop that was “cinematic,” that’s just what critics and fans kept telling him over the years. Now, he returns on Rucksack Records to finally deliver an album that was designed to sound that way, Cinematic Wax.

For this project, LTF is sampling from rare records found in Russia, Georgia, Tatarstan, Poland, Greece, and Hungary. As with much American digging, LTF still finds that in these regions, ‘70s records are the best source to pull samples from. While there are all sorts of interesting differences from pulling from these different sources, the heart of the music is still the same as other instrumental hip hop albums you’ll find this year – funky drum breaks, jazzy melodic lines, and rich layering of brass and strings to fill out the album and give it that sense of grandeur. When you put it all together, you get this interesting mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, where you can listen and dissect and discover what musicians were doing in this part of the world in the ‘70s, but you can also just throw this album on and enjoy some incredible funky hip hop beats with great production and arrangement to them. It’s the type of album that is immediately accessible, but then the more time you spend with it, the more nuance you uncover with each listen.

Not many artists from Omsk have had the international crossover appeal that LTF has found in his relatively young career. When you listen to Cinematic Wax, you’ll certainly understand how he’s been able to break through. While there is plenty of cultural specificity built into the project, the universal funk will appeal to people everywhere.