FROM the window of his waterfront office in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, Sufjan Stevens can see traffic creeping along Manhattan’s eastern edge, just across the river. He can see the party boats and barges float by, joined occasionally by groups of kayakers. And he can see the workers at the Con Edison power plant across from his building. It looks like the set of an old sci-fi movie and emits, he says, a high, crinkly buzzing sound. “Many a day has gone by where I’ve done nothing but just watch,” he said. He keeps a pair of binoculars on the windowsill, but doesn’t really use them to spy.

“Mostly I bird-watch,” he said. “About once a week there’s a starling that lands over here. When it happens, it’s profound. It’s like, what are you doing over here? You’re lost! There’s no nature anywhere.”

Sense of place has always been important for Mr. Stevens, an indie musician and multi-instrumentalist known for his geography-pegged projects, like the albums “Michigan” (2003), “Illinois” (2005) and “The BQE,” a 2007 orchestral suite and video composition about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Building quiet Americana out of his banjo- and guitar-strumming harmonies and narrative lyricism, he was at the forefront of a swirling psych-folk scene that allowed him to sell out rock clubs and the Allen Room at Lincoln Center. But for “The Age of Adz,” just out from Asthmatic Kitty Records, Mr. Stevens wanted to lose himself.

“I was sick of my voice and I was sick of the strummy-strum acoustic guitar song and I was sick of my lyrical approach,” he said in an interview in his office, sitting on a swively chair across from a baby grand piano and a fold-up preacher’s organ. “I didn’t want there to be a timeline or a historical marker, I didn’t want it to be rooted in any actual place.” Instead he took inspiration from a folk artist, Royal Robertson (the album title, pronounced “The Age of Odds,” is taken from one of his works, as is the cover art), and moved toward electronica, a sometimes cosmic, sometimes cacophonous sound.