I love everything about this album from Chicago multi-instrumentalist and Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, which is dedicated to his mother, Maxine. It’s a masterclass in subtle musicality and joyful tinkering that reflects Parker’s love for hip hop producers Madlib and J Dilla as well as jazz, blues and experimental rock.

The album picks up where his 2016 release, The New Breed, left off, with a vocal feature for his daughter, Ruby. There’s a strangeness and an innocence about the way she delivers the lyric (an ode to slowing down, building a nest and watching the world go by) that matches the engrossing jumble of toy piano sounds and lo-fi beats in the background. It’s a sonic collage – the musical equivalent of one of those David Hockney landscapes pieced together from hundreds of individual Polaroid pictures that don’t quite align – and it sets the tone for the rest of the album.

Like the creased photograph of Max on the cover, Parker’s tunes are full of fascinating idiosyncrasies and perfect imperfections. We hear hesitant guitar lines, detuned saxophones, lopsided grooves, sprinklings of kalimba, glistening synths and beats riddled with out-of-time handclaps and the lazy cluck of a tongue, which give the record a wonderfully human fallibility. Parker constantly wrong-foots and surprises you, using sonic sleight-of-hand to introduce new elements while making you wonder if they’ve been there all along. And then he strips everything away and lets you sink into a beautiful melody or a passage of bluesy guitar that he plays with the unhurried ease of someone sat alone in a rocking chair on their front porch. This is hugely inventive and absorbing music. I couldn’t stop listening.