Available on: Warp LP

Trying to make sense of A Sufi and a Killer is like trying to focus bloodshot eyes on a backdrop that’s constantly changing. It’s not just the dizzying array of samples employed by producers The Gaslamp Killer and Flying Lotus that disorientates, but Gonjasufi himself. Raised on a diet of hip hop and spiritualism, he evokes the spectre of the desert mystic, sun-blind and stoned, his frazzled singing voice profound as it is mutable, like a thin trail of smoke drifting above the Mojave desert he calls home. It’s best not to try and make sense of it.

But if you’re to treat the record like one long strange hallucinogenic trip, some passages for feel more vibrant than others. ‘Sheep’ is a beautifully mellow ballad about either not very much at all or something deeply profound, or possibly both. “I wish I was a sheep / Instead of a lion / So then I wouldn’t have to eat / Animals that are dying” he sings, alchemising the vague into the profound while the patchwork of samples – folky strum, 60s psychedelia, Hindi chant – mould fluently around his words. Just one song later, on ‘She Gone’, the stoner philosophising is replaced with aggression as he channels Tom Waits at his most raw, not just in the rasping crevices of his voice but in white knuckle accompaniment of distorted piano and drums; ‘Ancestors’ takes the street wisdom and creeping paranoia of Tricky and filters it through the fractured lens of Alejandro Jodorewski. The mood is only enriched by Gaslamp Killers grainy, almost decayed samples, their lo-fi quality perfectly blending with Gonjasufi’s vocal timbres.

For a record containing 19 tracks it’s inevitable that there are moments when the dreamlike gauziness is strained and broken. The Mainframe produced ‘Holidays’ sees the vintage psychedelic textures replaced by the clarity of digital bleeps more readily associated with Flying Lotus’ own Brainfeeder stable. As a standalone single it works brilliantly, but here it jars, as does ‘Candylane’’s funk interlude which feels lost and superfluous, just one style shift too far. But these are minor niggles that don’t detract from an album that is frequently brilliant and always intriguing, that confuses as much as it enlightens. Like I say, it’s a trip.

Louise Brailey