Earlier this week I was sitting on my couch watching rerun after rerun of Chopped during a light rainstorm when the image on the screen began to distort and fracture. Sometimes, when the weather is particularly perfect, my satellite struggles to communicate with its partner floating through space and blocky, artifacted images start spilling through. I don’t even watch TV anymore; it’s mostly just a background noise generator. But when technology starts degrading—becoming a shell of its former self—I get interested. Last week during a post-game interview at a Dodgers game, someone inadvertently soaked the camera while celebrating. The beautiful result was a brief moment of reality peeling itself away from television.

Something about the debut album by Gil Michell, the collaborative moniker for Australian producers Galapagoose and Wooshie, reminds me of this bizarre limbo space. Whimsical Raps is, if taken literally, only a half-accurate title. Besides two very brief moments of surreal rapping, the album is instrumental. But the Whimsical part is dialed up to 11. Between ambient swirls and crunchy, textured beats, these two producers have crafted something entirely otherworldly on their debut. The duo describe it as “a long-form exercise in meditative arrangement and rhythmic deconstruction,” and as you become attached to elements that are slowly pared away, you become more open to the idea of deconstruction as meditation.

In retrospect, the record’s first single, “No Friends,” might be the album’s biggest outlier. Over a footwork-laced beat and some Boards of Canada-ish spacey synthesizer, Gil Michell folds elements delicately into the mix, adding a dash of snare or a pinch of hi-hats. “I fly kites on the regular / love to drink that almond milk,” are among the albums only lyrics, and while it’s most likely spoken with a bit of sarcasm, the randomness almost feels like radio signals bleeding together and receiving two completely different messages. The song shortly thereafter flips to a haunted hip-hop influenced beat that disintegrates slowly under the weight of its own suspense.

“Smuggle Me” opens with a buzzing synth stab and wraps flakes of noise around it, eventually stuttering, clipping, and detuning like a CD player rejecting a disc. “K-Factor” is a wonky, disheveled affair resembling YYU, another under appreciated beatmaker working in the same realm of digital-analog rivalry. The 8-bit influence of “Wristband Connection” is delicately paired with percussion that sounds like crunching leaves and snapping twigs, before the song segues harshly into the cold dystopia of “Mariah.”

Through the album’s quick 36 minutes Gil Michell cover a lot of musical ground, but the record rarely feels misplaced or disjointed. It’s all tied together by this same ethereal sense that accompanies a disruption in technological perfection. Whimsical Raps starts out as a typical ambient beat album and subversively transcends expectations into something more complex. Upon repeated listening, it bleeds together in a mass of gooey synthesizers and lurching beats. It’s tightly composed in a way that makes it feel like it was made in 24 hours while permanently encased in a cloud of smoke.

The album’s closing track, “Dumb,” is some kind of cloud rap anthem telling off naysayers, with Gil Michell harmonizing, “When I was young and I was dumb / I used to care what other people thought of me.” Reflecting back on the pitched down vocals and ping-pong synth of the album’s opener, “Boy,” the titles and sonic elements become more poignant. Whimsical Raps starts the listener off naive, and finishes by displaying the loss of naivety on a silver platter. This isn’t particularly enlightening, in some ways every album begins with an innocent observer and ends with an informed consumer, but few albums lay the reality out so starkly to the listener.

The other day I came across a store selling handmade blankets of glitch art, and something about it made me chuckle. Because for all the aesthetic beauty of visual glitches, what they really represent is the decay and death of technology. A shattered iPhone screen is a daily reminder of the impermanence of everything. The fact that we’ve embraced degradation to the point of swaddling ourselves in $200 of handmade replications of it is somewhat surreal. As Halloween grows ever nearer and I see more people putting together cheap skeleton and ghost costumes I can’t help but think “That’s you. You are going to be that sooner than you think.” Gil Michell don’t just notice this hypocrisy, they embrace it fully and serve us back seconds.

Whimsical Raps is out now via This Thing.