Hollywood Medieval is an album about the glaring disparities and elaborate, underlying convolutions the composer observed and felt while working as a nanny for wealthy parents during his film composition studies at UCLA in the early part of the 2010's. Using an augmented a palette of classic DX7 and Juno 60 synths along with a severely warped bank of library samples and iPhone recordings, it spells out a queasily evocative simulacra of the city in flux, animating a sort of Ballardian tableaux that’s hyper-descriptive in its rendering of the hazy, dosed-up, and often delirious transitions between Hollywood's glamour and grime, using LA's gurning façades and ostentatious wealth as prompts for a richly visual side of sawn-off emotive signposts and jazz-taut turns of phrase that vividly etch on the memory in neon freehand. From the dizzying sugar rush of the opening sequence, Hollywood Medieval, to its spiralling counterpoint in Hollywood Medieval Pt. II, the album is an inception-like concerto, with Maxwell smartly subverting the film score composer's role by placing the music centre stage and allowing the narration to be carried by virtuosic flourishes owing to his classical and jazz music schooling, as he explains "one compositional intention was to push the sample libraries to their limits, testing their claims of being 'realistic', and finding the points at which they break and falter and become something new and less recognisable". In a sense, Hollywood Medieval resonate