What Metal Machine Music was to Lou Reed’s arc, New Blue Sun is to Andre-3000’s — a daring step away from anything remotely resembling pop music, and a symbolic act of protest against an industry, and/or a fan base, who would try to keep any artist inside a stylistic box. As different as the two all-instrumental albums are sonically, they accomplish something similar: cultivating a lush aural environment while almost entirely obscuring their maker. Andre-3000’s various flutes, both acoustic and electronic, are notable on New Blue Sun — hear the lovely six-beat melody that loops throughout “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy,” one of the eight, mostly epic-length tracks here — but they don’t take on any kind of starring role. Each piece feels like a sort of sonic installation, conjured mutually and lovingly by Andre and collaborators including percussionist Carlos Niño, guitarist Nate Mercereau and keyboardist Surya Botofasina: the shimmering New Age rainforest of “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears a 3000® Button Down Embroidered,” for example, or the abstracted cyborg-R&B drift of the hilariously and poignantly titled “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” What’s so refreshing about the record is that any sense of kitsch begins and ends with the sometimes cheeky titles: “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild” suggests a meme-y joke, but the track itself, driven by rumbling percussion and whooshing synths, feels genuinely spooky and seductive. Given the liberated/liberating aims of the project, it’s fitting that the longest track here, 17-minute closer “Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout into Undying Gardens,” is also the loveliest — a collage of spacey guitar, meandering flute and tiny sprinkles of percussion that feels like a leisurely walk through an enchanted garden.