This is not Mr. Butler’s first time as a boundary pusher. In the early 1990s, known as Butterfly of the alternative hip-hop group Digable Planets, he helped popularize the jazz-rap subgenre with the hit 1993 single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” which earned a Grammy. But he doesn’t dwell on the past. “I don’t know how many pairs of pants or dresses or clothes you have from 1993, but I don’t have any of that stuff,” he said. “It’s the same thing with my musical ideas. Sometimes I look back and I don’t even —— ” He paused and shook his head. “That’s what I thought was cool?”

Digable Planets broke up in the mid-’90s, and save for a few releases under the name Cherrywine in the early 2000s, Mr. Butler mostly let his musical career dwindle; he took film classes at New York University. Though he and Mr. Maraire grew up a few miles from each other here, they never met until after Mr. Butler returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2003 to be with his ailing mother after 15 years or so away.

Mr. Maraire, the son of the Zimbabwe-born musician and scholar Dumisani Maraire, who died in 1999, had been working in music as long as he can remember. “Everyone was born and started performing,” he said of his large family with a laugh. On “Lese Majesty,” Mr. Maraire, a producer on the album, plays African instruments like the mbira (a thumb piano) and the hosho (a seed-filled gourd).

When he approached Mr. Butler about playing music together, “He said he didn’t do music” anymore, Mr. Maraire said. But Mr. Maraire was persistent, and after collaborating on Mr. Maraire’s project Boy Wonder, the two became good friends; at one point, they lived next door to each other in the Columbia City neighborhood here.

After self-releasing two EPs as Shabazz Palaces, the two put out their debut album, “Black Up,” in 2011 on Sub Pop, an indie rock label most closely associated with early Nirvana and Soundgarden and the halcyon days of grunge. The signing had raised a few eyebrows, but Mr. Butler admired the staff’s eclectic taste (“They just like music, man,” he said), and that the label was local was a bonus. The album was well received, with Jon Pareles calling it “darkly innovative” in The New York Times. “Yes, hip-hop still has an audacious progressive fringe,” he wrote.

“Lese Majesty” is even more ambitious, with seven “astral suites” (in the words of its news release) in a flowing, seamless stream. Megan Jasper, the executive vice president of Sub Pop, who has worked at the label for 17 years, said of Mr. Butler: “He is one of the most creative and expansive thinkers I have ever come across. I don’t think Ish has ever walked a straight line in his entire life.”