In Lunice’s downtown Montreal apartment, everything is where it should be. Outside, it’s a sweaty late summer afternoon, but as I enter the 29-year-old producer’s home, a soothing odor greets me. (“Aesop,” Lunice tells me, misted through a diffuser). Instinctively, I kick off my Doc Martens before I notice my host’s velvet house shoes. Upstairs lies an open concept area: Lunice’s designs for a jacket, made with Nike, are strung above free weight equipment. A massive balcony overlooks the city — somewhere in that horizon lies the neighbourhood of Lachine where Lunice Fermin Pierre II was born (and where as a teenager he discovered breakdancing, graffiti, and Fruity Loops). There are mid-century modern shelves against every wall. They’re stacked with flowing succulents and beautiful objects like an church incense chalice, which Lunice uses in his live show, and a bong designed by ex-NASA scientists, which he rips from before we sit down on his couch. “I like to age with anything I buy,” he says, beaming as his dog, a Whippet named Winston, wedges himself us.

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The same fastidiousness that went into his apartment also contributed to his debut album CCCLX (“360” in Roman numerals), a resplendent hip-hop project out now on LuckyMe. You don’t have to listen too closely to CCCLX to hear the connection to TNGHT, Lunice’s project with Hudson Mohawke, which gave the EDM-rap sound of its day a volatile, untested steroid in 2011, and caught the ear of Kanye West, who enlisted TNGHT to co-produce “Blood On The Leaves” from his album Yeezus. But CCCLX’s grand space opera is laser-focused on Lunice’s biggest asset, which dictated the composition of each song: his unique talents as a live performer. Lunice, a demonstrative speaker, touches his temples as he discusses his path to the album. “It was always very, very clear to me,” he says.

TNGHT announced an amicable hiatus four years ago. “We knew that there was going to be some kind of electronic trap wave coming,” Lunice says. “We didn't necessarily want to be part of it. You can’t control when you end up crossing over into mainstream culture, and we wanted to make sure we have a foundation, a set of skills, so we can back it up for when we do.” So he went dark on social media, and began observing the currents of culture, attempting to “piece patterns together” from different trends. "The first thing I told myself [after the TNGHT hiatus] was I didn't want to make an album," he says. But bit by bit, his vision for a new project swam into view.

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CCCLX was fleshed out and recorded in hotel rooms around the world while he was on tour, but Lunice bunkered down for most of it in Montreal, where the low rent attract artists at every level of their careers. In 2015, Madonna asked Lunice to open for her European dates of her Rebel Heart tour, and he broke his longstanding rule not to leave Montreal for more than two weeks. He came back feeling even more confident that he could make CCCLX whatever he wanted. This was thanks in part to a pre-show ritual Madonna made artists and crew on her tour take part in. As they stood in a circle, Lunice told me, “she just said, like, ‘None of this matters.’ That was so liberating.”

The music of CCCLX is just one component of a system Lunice conceived of: CCCLX is also stage design, lighting, merchandise, and visuals, a multi-sensory experience designed to immerse fans while aspiring to timelessness. But are either of those things possible in our age of distraction, where half-read headlines form entire opinions and albums become white noise for surfing social media? Lunice is aware of the challenge he faces, but as he explained from his couch, he’s always analyzing how to properly take it on.