Guillermo Scott Herren, the man behind the monicker, claims he didn’t want the sixth full Prefuse 73 album to be a “bunch of pop songs”. Well, knock me down with a feather. The Only She Chapters’ sole concession to pop is a brief moment on ‘The Only Hand To Hold’ when harmonies, guitar twang and crunchy beats mesh to suggest a composition you can sink your teeth into, a thread you can follow. But even that’s slowed and warped into hypnagogic shape. Getting a hold on the rest of the album is like trying to mould air.

Herren isn’t exactly bringing the shocks with this insubstantial – mercurial – music. The timbre of his work remains largely consistent: hip-hop twisted and stretched into ever dreamier forms, until it becomes an ambient drone, has been his signature since Prefuse emerged a decade or so back and suffuses, to greater or lesser extent, his releases under pseudonyms Savath y Savalas, Delarosa & Asora et al. He laughs in the face of structure, then cuts it into bits, shakes it about and smooths out the mix.

Even so, The Only She Chapters tests the extremes. 2009’s Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian was itself already a step away from more conventional cut-up techniques, as Herren eschewed the digital to create the whole piece on analog Ampex tape (there had to be a reason for that title). Labouring under a strict remit, he still managed to make a record healthy with passages of real beauty, and that touch hasn’t scarpered – it just demands a bit more patience now.

The Only She Chapters passes like a babbling brook, the best part of an hour spent seamlessly passing through sonic undergrowth, chattering away, ringing and clicking. Two concepts are sustained – each track is entitled ‘The Only ‘, and the only vocals are female – and everything fits like a clasp. Beats and bass are few or replaced by bells on ‘The Only Test To Score’, or zaps of tin-pan percussion on ‘The Only Boogie Down’, and as each number merges into the next the effect is charmingly hypnotic. Rather than just sending you to sleep, that is. Voices have to fight to be heard over the busy mix, with Nico Turner heavily marginalised by the oriental refrains of ‘The Only Way To Find’, Zola Jesus chopped of all sense amid the terrifying swarm of glitches and whirs of ‘The Only Direction In Concrete’ and – most poignantly – the late Trish Keenan of Broadcast reduced to a murmur against the formless ‘The Only Trial Of 9000 Suns’. But lacking form or not, it may be the curse of hindsight that gives ‘The Only Trial Of 9000 Suns’ a liminal glow, its synthesised bells and soothing moans standing as a wordless eulogy. It has grace.

And grace characterises the mass, as choral harmony nestles with idling piano and warped woodwind. It’s good, it has depth; it’s neither for the dilettante nor the party-starter, but The Only She Chapters is a gauzy pleasure to get lost in as Herren ventures deeper into his personal sonic paint-pot. If you’ve got the application, go with him.