There’s a whole world of passionless chill hop and lo-fi beats on Spotify playlists made as background music for profit. SYNC.EXE exists in that same territory of jazz-infused instrumentals, but Dragonfly is a journey through galactic funk, deep groove and prog that’s so rich, warm and relentlessly inventive that it holds your attention completely from beginning to end.

David Price is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist from Elkton, Maryland and his seventh album Dragonfly sounds like being inside the mind of George Clinton, but instead of a band it’s one man at a computer with beat pads, keyboards, and a cast of collaborators invited on board the mothership for the ride. The record sounds like a rich garden with layers of warm organic sound flowering in every direction, and a complete disinterest in quantization.

The drums throughout Dragonfly are deeply unpredictable with polyrhythms that are constantly shifting and hard to follow, and even though most of the instrumentation shares that wonky and wilfully difficult quality it never feels like a challenging listen, because everything is focused on fun, funk, groove and warmth. Experimental music that wants to make you move.

Midas opens the album, closing with a monologue from the philosopher Alan Watts, setting the tone of a rich, contemplative atmosphere. New Reunion is a more straightforward guitar groove with limitless electronics swirling around a central funk pulse, and Price’s keyboard solos throughout the whole record use the pitch bend wheel with as much character as Stevie Wonder or a classic prog keyboardist.

Dreamscape has a beautiful vocal performance with drums so complicated that you follow the beat via the vocal line rather than the rhythm section. Lost Marbles is extremely wonky, glitchy and floaty, but all the instrumentation remains warm and positive despite its strangeness. Finders Keepers is led by a horn section doing meandering solos in the style of Kamasi Washington, the drums almost punk in their speed before breaking down into a piano and clap pattern with Dream Theater levels of strange time signatures, but sounding more like the warm purple funk of Prince than anything approaching prog rock. Rabbit Hole has incredibly strange drumming while a huge cloud of pads and keyboards floats above, Lucid has a beautiful live trumpet running through it, GAIA feels like classic MPC keyboard funk production, and the final three tracks pull back from the wild galactic energy before them, more focused on contemplative beauty.

The guest contributions blur so completely into Price’s own performances and synthesised elements that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Dragonfly is a wonderland of a record, indebted to Parliament Funkadelic and built by one man with a lot of friends, a lot of ideas, and absolutely no interest in making background music.