Jason Chung might have provided beats for some of the highest-profile rappers of his generation — he’s got credits on Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, Kid Cudi’s A Kid Named Cudi, and a 2011 one-off with the cusp-of-legendary Section.80-era Kendrick Lamar — but one listen to Drift reinforces just how adventurous mainstream rap was willing to get just to arrive at that point. And coming as he does from a scene where hip-hop was a springboard for advanced hybridization instead of a revanchist-preservationist orthodoxy lets Nosaj Thing get his hands in all kinds of mechanical guts for his own work. At a place and time where 8-bit chiptune sounds were becoming common, “1685/Bach” doesn’t stop to coast off NES nostalgia, but finds the uncanny qualities of its warbly string-section approximations as a good way to warp Baroque classical music into Dilla-time headnod fodder. His take on the surging American adoption of dubstep finds a different form than the drop-anticipating wub-wubs that would take over the following decade, with “Light #1” and “#2” focusing not on the 2-step rhythms but the garish, joyful glow of the Kapsize/Night Slugs “purple” and future bass sounds of the decade’s changeover. That also goes for the lonely ambience that artists like Burial and Mala were exploring, which makes cuts like “Us” sound like inadvertent precursors to the sparser material those artists were doing ten years later. And some tracks just get their emotional hooks in you before you can even assign a genre to them; “IOIO” might recall some intangible melange of goth/prog/EBM/wonky signifiers but good luck sorting them all out before you give in to its overwhelming sense of vertigo instead. But Nosaj’s experimentation isn’t too avant-garde to grasp — in fact, its hooks are pretty immediate, and you can still find all the spaces and cues to find the beat and where you could fit inside it, whether you’re holding a mic or on the floor.