Earlier this year I sat in a quiet café with Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, to discuss his cosmic, mortality-facing fifth LP, You’re Dead!Throughout the chat he exuded serenity, unspooling sentences with practiced elegance, but a switch flicked when I asked for his thoughts on the afterlife. Suddenly wired and prophetic, Ellison leaned forward. "I think there’s more," he whispered over the salt shaker. "There’s another experience, something beyond our understanding. It's gonna be more confusing and way, way surreal."

Many listeners of You’re Dead! will relate to Ellison’s reading. Most reviews lauded the producer’s inquisitive treatment of death—he waxed astrophysical, flung open cosmic doorways, faced the abyss and found God in a kick-drum. And that drive for sprawling electronic transcendence reflects a small but highly concentrated aesthetic that’s developed over the last half-decade. Crucial to FlyLo’s legacy are his "digital maximalist" contemporaries like Rustie, Hudson Mohawke and, more recently, Evian Christ and PC Music, who all capitalize on our digital access to cultures past and present. They seem to surpass our earthly boundaries and sculpt warped new dimensions, and their widescreen sounds can resemble vast and impressive visions of death.

But the more I listened, the less I recognized FlyLo as a brave spiritual spaceman. Instead, what emerged from his music was an exquisite, maximalist denial of death. There are signs all over but most instructive was Shintaro Kago’s album artwork, a trippy depiction of smirking skeletons and cartoonish gore. Here, the slapstick humor represents Ellison's trying to side with death—he nudges its ribs, laughs at its jokes, maybe a little too loudly. And as the jammed-to-burst songs escalate in scope and intensity, you start to sense that he’s not embracing mortality but frantically repressing it.

It’s a feature of our information age that we reject mysterious concepts like death. Today, ignorance is a question of choosing what not to know: we tap for nutritional info, tap for celebrity birthdays, tap for particulars of our favourite assassination. So it seems bizarre that our existential beef with impermanence should persist—not just unresolved but intensified. Not only are we just as helpless as ever, we’re also more aware of our helplessness—we tap for 10 Inspirational Quotes on Mortality—and it’s unnerving to think that we, unlike our social profiles and spam filters, won’t be around to celebrate our Tumblr blog’s 100th birthday.

Confusingly, we also live in an age when the dead just won’t go away. We relive their experiences in biopics, vintage concert footage and sometimes in hologram form. Dominating the box office are zombies and vampires. Our reluctance to let go reflects our inability to fathom mortality, an insecurity that’s perhaps most evident in music. To despise death is to live excessively, and that defensive commitment to life is rarely more obvious than in rock. From day one, its icons have smoked, snorted, slugged and shot up, all popular displays of arrogance in death’s presence.

But while popular electronic music is hardly immune to excess—for a while chemical indulgence was its *raison d’être—*it’s true that, until relatively recently, it felt straightforwardly escapist; if a track blew your head off, it did so in the colloquial sense. Now, as the internet spreads excessive record-collecting beyond the realm of fusty crate-diggers, and as maximalism finds a major outlet in stars like Kanye, it’s possible to investigate deeper. In Retromania, Simon Reynolds explains that the "standard psychoanalytic interpretation of obsessive collecting is that it is a way of warding off death," often stemming from childhood anxiety and an excessive desire to organize the world. But as Slavoj Žižek says in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, "A desire is never just a desire itself - it is a desire to continue to desire." In other words, the point of excess is not to sate, but to prolong, which is why the collector will always covet the "missing piece." To live excessively is to chase a dream of eternal, fast-burning desire, one in which reality can be postponed indefinitely and invested into objects that will outlive their collector.