This was the second of two albums Ras G cut for Brainfeeder — the rest of his career, tragically cut short by his death at age 40 in 2019, is best experienced through the myriad Raw Fruit beat tapes he cut for Matthewdavid’s Leaving Records. But if you want the most exciting initial foray into his sprawling, endlessly exploring discography, this is the way to go. Back on the Planet is an expansion on the foundation laid by predecessor Brotha From Anotha Planet that trusts you to have that album’s expansive free-beat complexity in mind and an urge to hear it taken even further out into the cosmos. It makes its most avant statement right out the gate, as though the dense, polyrhythmic tumult of its opening title cut is the storm before the calm — it really is a chaotic beast of a track, refusing to find a single groove and startling the listener with unpredictable possibilities as it wavers between tape-loop distortion and percussive barrages that feel more like tempests than beats. But the point’s not to overwhelm the listener — it’s to coax them, stoke their curiosity, then reveal the surprisingly familiar threads that run through the fabric of his sound. A Mikey Dread exclamation that positions the wonky bass-cannon wobble “Culture Riddim” as a reclamation of sub-frequency assaults in the name of dub, scenester shout-out “One 4 Kutmah” builds a gelatinous cathedral to analog filth over the same Black Sabbath drum break OutKast flipped for “Hootie Hoo,” and “Natural Melanin Being…” juxtaposes its Black-pride affirmations on top of a wavering-tempo psychedelic dirge drone that might sound sorrowful if it didn’t have the sense of revelation and beatific self-respect in its words. And no matter how avant-garde this album gets, it always sounds big — the kind of beats that took the scrambled clap/kick/snare concoctions of the L.A. beat scene’s more abstract corners and gave them the kind of window-rattling depth that felt fine-tuned for maximum lowrider impact.