Flying Lotus is a man of many colors. The L.A.-based musician and producer has been crafting some of the most nuanced and experimental electronic music out there since 2006, making weirdo rap as Captain Murphy, soundtracking Adult Swim, and producing artists from the likes of Thundercat to Mac Miller. His latest release, You’re Dead!, is perhaps his most personal album yet – at least, if artistic statement is any measure of individuality. Clocking in at a brief 39 minutes, it’s less an album and more a collage of sounds, woven with deliberation. At its most consistent, it’s a carousel of guest artists that circle FlyLo like planets around a star, working to illustrate the motion of gravity that is his take on death and rebirth.

Opener “Theme” serves as a representation of the record: it’s fleeting and incredibly dynamic, shifting through variations on a jazz idea with such speed that it leaves the listener awestruck. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with every sound that flies overhead; don’t try to listen so hard, Flying Lotus seems to be saying, just sit back and let the motion carry you. The track and the album it announces flip through cinematic electronica, footwork-y beat-craft, and radio-ready jazz like a confident poker player tossing cards aside.

Some songs, like the entrancing “Tesla” and the delightful “Eyes Above”, shine as delicious blends of jazz and electronica, the overlay of authentic snare rolls and cascading synths pulsing with subtle power. Calm interludes will give way to sudden bursts of virtuosic guitar fills without warning or surprise – it all flows together in harmony. The dynamics are incidental; it’s the presentation that makes You’re Dead! such a strong album. “Cold Dead” works as another such collage, transcendental in its unclassifiability. I chuckle at the idea of a musician from one or two centuries ago trying to decide what this music is.

Other tracks are more discernable. “Fkn Dead” clocks in at only 40 seconds, but it’s one of the best 40 seconds of music that’s come out in the past several years. It serves not just as another link in the chain of the album, but as an example of FlyLo’s power as a musician – showing us that he’s just as capable of creating immediately awesome jazz as he is at stitching music together into a psychedelic tapestry. You can barely tell where one song ends and another begins, so seamless is the album as one work.

“Never Catch Me” is one of the album’s big name-drops, featuring chart-topping rapper Kendrick Lamar spitting furious verses. The music behind Lamar begins jazzier and more restrained than much of the record, acting to highlight his lyrics, which are just as important for their rhythm and the way they sound as for their individualistic message. You get the sense that Lamar is acting as Flying Lotus’s oracle, chuckling to the listener that they’ll never, ever catch him, immersed in his cloud of musical wizardry.

“Dead Man’s Tetris” features the honorable Snoop Dogg and Captain Murphy, Flying Lotus’s rapping alter ego. It’s a playfully macabre track, echoing Danny Elfman with lyrics like “I think I forgot my meds” and sinister laughs in the background. Snoop Dogg’s own balance of mischievous and serious lyricism makes him the perfect contributor for the track.

“Coronus, The Terminator” is as mesmerizing as anything he’s ever created, without so much as a “feat.” It’s a sinewy, pulsing heartbeat of a track, replete with lush harmonies and choral arrangements that add up to an almost divine sound, reaching heavenward with unshakeable simplicity in rhythm and melody. It’s also one of FlyLo’s rare tracks sung by himself, albeit with a massive chorus of voices behind him. “Coronus” and “Siren Song” are both relaxed vocal-centric tracks, pushing further back into the listener’s comfort zone by emphasizing a traditional beat. They’re also among the album’s trippiest, acting as particularly solid blocks of the collage. Angel Deradoorian’s appearance on the latter track comes in the form of quick single-note vocalization, which is rather mezmerizing.

*Listen to “Coronus, The Terminator” below:

It’s worth noting that although the album is chock-full of impressive guests, it’s tracks like “Turkey Dog Coma” and “Coronus The Terminator” remind us that You’re Dead! is, at its core, a jazz album, translated through FlyLo’s signature electronic manipulations. Musically, it might not sound a whole lot like jazz, but its place in context of the album makes it one of the jazziest moments in spirit. The patchwork rainbow of sounds he’s created seems more about composite effect than any individual track, which makes its guest artists less like song-featured guests and more like dinner-party guests. Even the album’s live rhythm section, led by prog-rock drummer Deatoni Parks (Mars Volta, Bosnian Rainbows) and bassist Thundercat (longtime FlyLo cabal collaborator/Suicidal Tendencies), feels like a gang of puppets acting out his supernatural theater.

“Turtles” is more in the spirit of “Cold Dead”, and the relative calm of its meditative followup “Ready Err Not” pairs like a good wine. You’re Dead! moves in sections, like a dream, giving the sense that the album is like a line of brushstroke colors, with each track a shape penciled in within each color. The fact that the tracks all flow together without pause is a testament to the record’s continuity; it’s 39 minutes of straight music.

Up next is highlight “Moment of Hesitation”, which features jazz legend Herbie Hancock on keys. “Herbie was like my grandpa,” FlyLo chuckled in an interview with BBC6 Radio host Gilles Peterson, “and he was really into the music.” The song features twinkly keyboard work, swirling around what sounds like a beat made of drum brushes. It’s smooth as the night sky, and instantly makes you crave more.

*Listen to “Moment of Hesitation” below:

The unsettling chant of “Descent Into Madness” is one of the album’s most straightforward tracks, a dissonant hymn almost religious in its solemnity. Lotus’s falsetto announces your insanity like the theme of a video game, eerie chords giving way to an eerier matra. The discomfort continues with “The Boys Who Died In Their Sleep”. It’s emotionally similar to “Dead Man’s Tetris” but more disturbed, built solely on Flying Lotus’s insane falsetto about self-medication, paired with his unapologetic rap as Captain Murphy.

The pause after these two tracks serves as a breath of fresh air, before leading into “Obligatory Cadence”, a vaguely classical-sounding piece that feels like a sort of musical rebirth. It descends into a backdrop of faded beats before finally dropping into “Your Potential//The Beyond” and then “The Protest”, overlapping doses of melody to sweeten the comedown. You’re left with a sense of wonder, and if he’s done his job, you can wake up tomorrow with less a fear of death than when you went to sleep – after all, one gets the feeling that after listening to You’re Dead!, the album releases its strongest magic through one’s dreams. Sleep tight.

-Asher Meerovich (@Bummertime)