It’s a little bit shocking when the voices come in. Even if you already knew Opening Night was a record of a live performance inaugurating a new experimental theater space in LA, you didn’t expect the microphone to swoop so close to the action. Throughout the previous half-hour, the performance has remained at a professional remove from the audience, and yet as closing track “Opening Night” begins we’re greeted by a flood of personalities, their conviviality a contrast to the icy, creeping music surrounding them.

Everyone sounds about 27, and we hear a lot of broad LA accents. One of them talks about a remix they’re working on. “I need a hug,” says another. “See ya, buddy!” says a third. In other words, the noises you’d expect at a hip party in the 2020s. Lively chatter doesn’t necessarily jar against melancholy music and in fact often enhances it, like the audience on old jazz albums like Ahmad Jamal’s Live At The Pershing or the purgatorial smattering of spectators lurking in the margins of Moodymann’s Silence In The Secret Garden. But the people we hear on Danish improvisers MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s new live album aren’t ghosts — not yet, at least. They sound like people you might know, especially if you’ve read two paragraphs into a Stereogum article on an ambient album.

Few live albums have made me as acutely aware of the distance between performer and audience. There’s a kayfabe at rock shows where the band and the audience are all part of the same ritual, but it’s a one-sided conversation. It can get lonely; ask any touring musician what it’s like to see the world and they’ll say they don’t get to see very much of it (got to get to the hotel, get to the venue, load in, do interviews, play, etc.). Several tracks here are named after streets in LA, but they’re all within a couple blocks of the theater, as if they wanted to compose an album about the City of Angels but only had enough time to create one about the immediate vicinity of the venue they’re playing.

In a sneaky way, Opening Night is about the experience of being a working musician. A guest like Laurel Halo, who drops in on “House On The Hills” (and who released the album on her Awe label on Valentine’s Day) can come and go as she pleases. But Velsorf and Nielsen are the entertainment for the evening, on guitar and synthesizers respectively, and there’s a world of conversation they’re missing out on. I can’t imagine they’re complaining, especially as this might just be the gig that makes both of their careers, but the frostiness of the music is truer to their own remove than to the ambience of the event itself. I was reminded of Coatcheck, the album Florian TM Zeisig made about his experience working at a club, which literally sounded like a party heard through the wall.

Nielsen opens “Prelude” with an opening burst of sampled chamber strings that sound like a parody of the kind of music that might play at a gala such as this — a charity ball on The Simpsons, complete with ice sculptures and snooty tuxedoed violinists. Then comes Velsorf, and the sound of his instrument makes this music sound exciting in a way most ambient music doesn’t. The tones he uses lean towards the “More Than A Feeling” school of melancholy, not far removed from fellow Dane ML Buch but with a percussive attack evocative of Derek Bailey’s playing on Ballads. On the basis of this performance, Velsorf seems primed to capture a zeitgeist of experimental guitar music that takes cues from bygone eras of radio rock but is triumphantly genre-averse (see also Buch, Klein, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton). I can’t wait to hear where he goes next.

Abstracting cues from the music you might’ve heard on the radio is also a key component of mallsoft, a micro-microgenre of vaporwave whose purpose is to sound as if it’s vaguely issuing from the intercoms of one of America’s many dead malls. I was reminded of mallsoft while listening to Opening Night, not just because these five tracks borrow from the same well of MOR soft rock but because they sound like they’re emanating from a neglected corner of the place in which they’re being played, the notes hanging tentatively in endless dead space. Velsorf and Nielsen sound like they’ve been set up in some unmapped corner of the venue, told to start playing, and forgotten about.

They’re the house band for the Backrooms, and they sound the part on “Vine,” a 13-minute monolith sculpted from the same worried synth pads that play when fateful decisions are made in ’90s TV dramas. It’s worth wondering what inspired the two to serenade this joyous event with something so sour. Blame a streak of idle mischief, but I’d like to imagine that from their vantage they’ve discovered something deeper and more sinister happening beneath the attention of the crowd, as if the partygoers’ immortalization on record means they’re bound to relive Opening Night again and again.

Opening Night is out now via Awe.