When the pandemic hit, MIKE DEAN—the legendary Southern hip-hop producer and Kanye West collaborator—found himself with more studio time on his hands than he was used to. So he turned his attention to the racks of keyboards around him and began indulging in the kind of noodly, arpeggiated, minor-key synthscapes that people often associate with singular film composers like John Carpenter and Goblin. It was DEAN looking inward while also broadcasting his improvisations to a growing number of fans watching on his social feeds. Truth is, DEAN has been making this kind of music for himself since the beginning of his career. “I just never do it with artists,” he tells Apple Music. “When you're producing for an artist, you need to scale things back. You've got to think more about the song. You can't go crazy on the synths.” Those extended jams would form DEAN’s first solo album, 4:20 (released on 4/20/20—yes, he's an avowed cannabis connoisseur). His second LP of synth, guitar, and drum machine experiments—4: 22—came a year later. But while those LPs are entirely different beasts from his production work for the likes of Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, or Beyoncé, they reveal something deeper about how his sound—moody, dark, searing, noisy, always staring into the abyss—has pushed hip-hop and R&B further into left field with each new record he’s involved in. Cut to August 2021, when DEAN, holed up in the bowels of Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium amid what would become one of the most bizarre, and riveting, album rollouts of all time—for West’s Donda—was still working out the details for his first-ever solo stage show, which he announced just weeks before, at the comparatively minuscule Echoplex in LA. “We basically planned it in a week and a half before the show,” DEAN says. He and Kanye were still tinkering with Donda as the world watched on. “I was definitely scared I wasn't going to finish the album in time to make it to my show,” he says. Some of what makes up ECHOPLEX (LIVE 2021)—which was assembled from recordings over August 21 and 22, 2021—may sound familiar, but the vast majority of it is the artist in his element, creating on the fly. “It was a real challenge to do,” he says, “because both of my albums were all improv. So it's kind of hard to go back and learn it to recreate it, especially with a lot of analog [synthesizer] sets, because you're just turning knobs. You can't recreate that every day.” The biggest surprise here, though, may be the guest appearance of Christine and the Queens, whose upcoming album DEAN is in the process of producing. “We both like to do real nerdy, intricate music,” he says of their collaboration, the first glimpse of which is “RAHIM LIVES.” “We're going crazy on everything.”