Between the piracy, the leaks, the surprise releases, and the streaming service arms race, today’s recording industry is closer to the Wild West than a longstanding global market. For years now, sheriffs at Apple Music and Tidal have struggled to convince customers in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to pay for their damn music already. And yet, across the sea in Japan, folks continue to play by the rules—and what’s more, they’re on track to surpass the United States as the world’s most lucrative music market. Unlike most of the world, Japan didn’t experience the Napster revolution; in fact, the supposedly obsolete CD continues to account for about 85 percent of sales. Moreover, the major streaming services (and their exclusive releases) have yet to become available in the country. In other words, while we’ve been blasting three different incarnations of Kanye West’s latest album The Life of Pablo for two months, over 127 million people have been sitting in the dark; until the album’s broader global re-release earlier this month, 2016’s most-hyped album was little more than a Dark Tidal Fantasy. What was a Kanye stan to do?

The solution couldn’t be more obvious for Toyomu, a Kyoto-based producer and ’Ye diehard: if he couldn’t listen to The Life of Pablo, he’d have to make his own version. "I thought it might be a good idea to make the whole album without listening to it," he told Pigeons and Planes. Ironically, the same digital forces that kept him from hearing the album proved key to his reinterpretation. Thanks to WhoSampled and Genius, the producer was able to assemble a complete listing of every last obscure sample and punchline featured on the record, providing Toyomu with the material for his own "Album of the Life:" 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ, or (Imagining "The Life of Pablo"). The project isn’t so much a recreation as it is an uncanny, absurd outlier among the scores of fanservice-y ’Ye mash-ups populating the internet.

The Life of Pablo—and obviously, Toyomu’s project*—*wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet. West has vowed never to release the project across physical formats, instead relying on streaming to drive its success. (The record recently became the first to top the Billboard charts primarily from streaming.) This has created headaches and opportunities alike: Liberated from the finality of a CD pressing, the album—like its creator, and the internet at large—remains in perpetual flux, its trappings mutable. As Toyomu put it in a Genius interview, it's "an eternity of creativity." Accordingly, the record feels more like a snapshot than like a tacit statement.

If you thought Yeezus was esoteric, just try to make it through*印象III : なんとなく、パブロ—*It makes West’s opus sound like a Rockabye Baby! installment, primarily because it sounds so inhuman. All of the lyrics are fed through Apple's text-to-voice function, giving us a record performed entirely by Microsoft Sam (known to most listeners as the stiff-sounding android that "sings" Radiohead’s "Fitter, Happier.") Obviously, the robot sucks at rapping, stripping the songs all nuance in syllable stress and meter, particularly on the standout cuts. Lead single "有名税" ("Famous)] collapses under the weight of all its lyrical moving parts, transmitting the braggadocio into paranoid-sounding pep talk. "I made that bitch famous/God damn/I made that bitch famous/Talk that talk, man" deadpans simultaneous MC/hypeman Sam, unable to distinguish between West’s rhymes and Swizz Beat’s ab libs. (A similar phenomenon lends hilarity to "ゆらゆらボックス 0" ("Waves"), with Chris Brown’s smooth tenor taking the form of a high-pitched, drunken warble.) Even "Low Lights,"—a song centered around Sandy Rivera's passionate inspirational speech—feels mechanical, her every syllable stuck to a hollow, randomly-pitched keyboard plunk in a manner that channels Wesley Willis.

The technology detracts from the latent menace in West’s raps as well, even as the established samples on "Freestyle 4" and "FML" drive the darkness home. In Toyomu’s world, the agitated, carnal queries on the former track ("What if we fucked right now?/What if we fucked right in the middle of the goddamn dinner table?") may very well have come from a curious eight-year-old. The chuckle-inducing moments are frequent (not to mention steadily grating), but there’s ample darkness lurking in the margins: On "Real Friends" and "Highlights," Toyomu digs up the angst buried within West's gospel-infused opus. Meanwhile, "I Love Kanye" is entirely devoid of its a cappella cheer, replaced by a nightmarish duet delivered atop mournful keyboards: following an eerie, monotone Japanese recitation of the track's lyrics, a choir of English-speaking androids come in to proclaim their love for West.

In terms of creepiness, however, nothing compares to "nikeezy," Toyomu’s take on "FACTS." The less-than-two-minute track transports me back to a traumatizing video from my high school physics class that simulated death by black hole. In this case, it’s Kanye who’s being sucked up by the end of it all, his repeated chants of "Yeezy, yeezy, yeezy" stretching and spinning as the rapper floats along the event horizon. The syllables collide with increasing force and velocity, until the song's "Street Fighter" sample resets the sickening cycle with a Sonic Boom. It’s impossible to listen to the track without cracking up, and yet it haunts me more than any Prurient song—not just because it’s terrifying, but because it illustrates the artist's absurdity more than any interview or album ever could. Kanye’s hubris drives our obsession with his art and persona—as well as his own destruction. The celebrity, the memes, the outbursts, the KTT stans—they’re all window dressing to distract from the void that threatens to consume him, and us.

印象III : なんとなく、パブロ may sound like a bit like an Oneohtrix Point Never album at moments, but it’s unlikely to break out of the fan-content niche any soon. Microsoft Sam’s goofy rhymes get old quick, the half-baked, discombobulated arrangements lack the nuance to compel repeat listens, and save for awesome, video-game influenced reworkings of "Fade" and "Siiiiiiiiilver Surffffeeeeer Intermission" (the latter incorporates music from the notorious, well-soundtracked "Silver Surfer" NES game), most won’t be reaching for Toyomu’s takes over West’s. That said, such surface-level aesthetic arguments distract from the album’s sterling achievements. This strange little record has certainly refigured how we view streaming’s ubiquity in the today's industry—not to mention how we perceive the "global album"—but it’s also opened the doors for transcending such barriers through creative drive and compositional savvy. If we can’t have #Tidalforall, at least we can take the power into our own hands.