If you’ve ever knelt down to the ground and observed a mass of insects swarmed together, you’ve probably been fascinated by the ordeal of it all. From a distance, ants crowding a discarded scrap of food looks chaotic, little legged pebbles swirling with seemingly no direction. But the closer you get, you start to uncover patterns in their movement, how each ant leaves a chemical trail that others fall precisely in line with. Draw your finger across a line of marching ants and watch the followers become disoriented. Having lost their scent trail, they have no other help beside instinct.

So, thinking about that, I’ve naturally been getting into jazz fusion lately (I swear this will all make sense eventually). Miles Davis‘ In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorius are a few who have soundtracked long days in front of a computer at work. The intricacies of complex arrangements lend themselves well to distraction from work, but similarly can be appreciated as passive listening too. I think of it like the worker ants, mind-bogglingly chaotic from afar, strangely beautiful up close. For a more contemporary example, I’ve had Euglossine‘s Complex Playground on repeat for a few weeks now.

Released in February on avant-wave label Beer on the Rug, Complex Playground takes cues from kitschy vaporwave, jazz fusion, and leftfield beat construction. The Gainesville, Florida artist folds a lot of outside influences into those broad descriptors: flecks of chiptune dominate “Bright Bound Foray” and “Silver Knot,” bubbling ambient noise gives way to otherworldly corporate hold music on “Prairie,” and “Welcome!” plays like an N64 racing game’s credit sequence music.

Euglossine gets their name from Euglossini, a jewel-like bee notable for their independent behavior. Where typical bees work in groups, members of the Euglossini family are staunchly antisocial. You can take that as a metaphor for Complex Playground, the music within covertly references sociality—telephone hold music, elevator muzak, video games—but confoundingly feels detached.

It’s computer music taken to an absurd extreme, where some of the more jazzy songs here like “Nucleus Pilot” would take a carefully coordinated group of highly trained musicians countless hours of practice to execute precisely, the subliminal knowledge that a lot of the audible instruments are being triggered by a computer, not to mention the Metheny-esque guitar paired with 8-bit synths, wrap Complex Playground up in a cloth that feels like billowing layers of irony and sincerity. That’s not to suggest that Euglossine isn’t highly skilled in their own right, but an internal bias makes me associate music like this with traditional instrumentalists, not aesthetically-inclined net artists.

Listening to Complex Playground feels like submerging yourself in a pool of melted dollar bin jazz CDs, the silvery goo bubbling and coating every visible surface. A track like “Miraculous Ornament” sounds like the intro music to a JRPG’s comic relief character, the pattering keys giving way to a circus of synthesized strings and buzzing melodies. The album closes with “The Last Roulette,” a laid-back (seriously, there’s a Rhodes solo) jam that falls somewhere between Anamanaguchi and the Sims buy-mode theme.

Euglossini are stunningly beautiful insects, their blue-green exoskeletons shaded in an iridescent, metallic fashion. It’s rare for a musician’s namesake to so accurately encapsulate the feeling of their music (Baths is an example at failing at this) but between their isolated behavior and futuristic coloring, Euglossine found a perfect example in these unique orchid bees. Complex Playground, too, feels apropos after a front-to-back listen. If you can imagine going headfirst down a Sophie slide and emerging 40 minutes later soaked in candy goo, you can imagine the experience of Complex Playground. Just watch out for the pretty stingers.

Complex Playground is out now via Beer on the Rug.