Formed last spring after a trip to LA by Lewis Rainsbury, Alex Bailey and Matt Law, Vondelpark’s early work found release on the Sauna EP, a record that explored the emotional blankness of modern life - plane travel, jet lag, interaction and long distance relationships, yet crackling between Lewis’ haunted voice and haunting vocal samples, Sauna was a work of precocious emotional depth and density. Home recorded and lo-fi, it blended cut-and-paste sampled beats and longingly minimal guitar lines, yet the complexity of arrangements and layers of sounds were made to feel natural and simplistic. Their second EP, nyc bags and nyc stuff, develops on the musical themes of Sauna. Still anchored by Lewis’ tender vocals it’s more abstract in its sampling and feels more musically cohesive. Rather than dealing with the emotional alienation of modernity nyc bags instead feels deeply personal, an exploration of the internal rather than external. Opening track ‘TV’ maybe best exemplifies their use of samples and the way they are built around original work, constructing stuttering melodic evocations that grow from a single repetitive loop to mingle with a sparkling guitar and implacable snatches of vocals. When the beats kick in over the refrain of ‘Colder, faster, TV’ it climaxes so subtly it could almost be missed. Second track ‘Feat B’ is the EP’s most straightforward, almost encroaching on r’n’b in its structure and influence, drawing on the genre’s sentimentality and slow jams and underpinned by a female vocal. Like much of the work on nyc bags the vocals are manipulated in a way that the original sense of what’s been used, sampled and recorded is deviated from to leave just its abstract imprint and after listening for long enough the distinction between original recording and sampling becomes blurred beyond recognition. Like ‘Feat B’, ‘Camels’ also takes something from r’n’b, but more conspicuously draws on the beats of the UK underground, it is instrumentally den