The record, he says, is something of a journey through his subconscious mind, and for the most part, it’s a pretty bracing listen, bouncing between grating sonic strobes and flesh-melting synth squiggles, semi-tonal string sections and teetering flamenco rhythms. At its most abrasive, such as on “Sisters,” the album can catch you off-guard with a deafening wall of static noise, flickering on and off at random in your right headphone channel. But Xen also has its fair share of very tender moments, especially when his voice drops in to offer the odd robotized moan, or when he flexes his piano skills in real time, dipping in and out of tentative melodies on songs like “Sad Bitch” and “Held Apart.” Although it shares much of its instrumental palette with dance music, Xen doesn’t adhere to a reliable grid; and while there are poignant swells of melody, demonstrating his ability to write a good pop hook doesn’t seem to be a concern. Instead, he’s wielding his chops in the service of a narcotic, whiplash emotionalism, as though bringing his childhood alter ego to life were somehow of a piece with revisiting his teenage study of Schumann and Mendelssohn. Xen unfolds with the freewheeling expressivity of Romantic-period composition, but with beats.

While the slightly more accessible &&&&& seemed to show the world what he was capable of as a pop innovator, Xen pushes his artistry forward by virtue of a retreat inward, to a place somehow beyond intellect and reason. In this way, Xen may be understood as yet another instance of Ghersi jumping off the cliff, demanding that his listeners and acquaintances come meet him where he is, instead of the other way around. The same goes for his decision to be interviewed for the first time since Yeezus: long a fan of letting the music speak for itself, he says he wants to push himself to try something new this time around, especially because he feels “the work calls for it.” From the perspective of someone who’s on the outside looking in, there’s something both exciting and frightening about watching him on the cusp of that great self-unveiling. When you muster the courage to be completely, unapologetically yourself, there’s always the risk that external reality will somehow reaffirm your deepest fears: the fear that you’ll put yourself out there and people won’t react in the way you hope, that you’ll ask them to come to you and they won’t. On a creative level, that’s the whole peril and thrill of making music that’s experimental in the truest sense of the term: before listeners can appreciate something that doesn’t sound like anything that’s come before, they’re going to have to learn how to listen all over again.

For his part, Ghersi says listening to Xen always makes him want to get up and dance, and the night before my flight back to New York, when I catch him DJing a party in the low-ceilinged basement of a pub in East London, he’s doing just that, clad in a refashioned straightjacket that seems to be slowly unzipping itself as the night draws on. The dance floor is at capacity, and Ghersi is hamming it up behind the booth, singing along word-for-word to some Venezuelan party music, pitching it up on the CDJ with a devil-may-care turn of the wrist, then singing along some more. As the crowd reaches peak turn-up, he gives his boyfriend a big hug and a kiss, and I’m reminded of something he said to me earlier that week, when for some reason we found ourselves talking about the contortionist in the film Holy Motors. Excited to hear that I was a fan of her’s, too, he’d gone to his computer and pulled up some pictures of her striking a succession of anatomically incomprehensible poses on the red carpet at Cannes: “Oh yeah, she knows exactly what she’s doing,” he’d said. It was a line I’d hear him repeat whenever pointing to somebody else’s fearless femininity, but he could just as easily have been talking about Xen.

Note: Following a clarification from the artist on Twitter, we have amended the language of this piece to reflect Ghersi's role as the "sole co-producer" of the upcoming Björk album, as opposed to "sole producer."