Vernon has filled the years between Bon Iver albums by recording with others, running his own the Eaux Claires festival that he created in Wisconsin, and working (particularly in Berlin) with an amorphous, expanding artistic collective that was initially called PEOPLE and then restyled — look at it upside-down — as 37d03d. None of the songs on “i,i” is credited to Vernon alone.

In a way, “i,i” pulls Bon Iver back from the brink. Bon Iver’s previous album, “22, a Million” from 2016, was even more enigmatic, with typographically challenging alphanumeric song titles for tracks built on deliberately fractured and attenuated structures. Its interruptions and juxtapositions often set an abstract electronic realm against the physical one of voices and instruments — mirroring, perhaps, the way the internet now intrudes on everyday consciousness, even when we’re not looking at a screen.

The new album is just as chameleonic, but not as jarring; its rival forces have learned to cooperate. The album’s watchwords might be found in “Salem”: “What I think we need is elasticity, empowerment and ease,” Vernon sings. In the new songs, hissing, blipping, whooshing electronic sounds dovetail with Vernon’s vocal harmonies, floating guitar lines, chamber-music string arrangements and jazzy horns.

Image “i,i” is Justin Vernon’s fourth album as Bon Iver.

Vernon has spoken about developing a song from an “environment” — an electronic texture — the way he once built on guitar chords, and many of the songs on “i,i” materialize amid clouds of noise. Its brief opening track, “Yi,” and the full-length song that follows it, “iMi,” grew out of a snippet of found sound that Vernon couldn’t stop toying with. As chords and melodies surface, the noise often finds its way into the rhythm section.