Asked to characterize the new Dixie’s Death Pool release, Twin Galaxies, sound sculptor Lee Hutzulak laughs and offers an unusually pithy assessment: “There’s some density there.”

He’s not kidding. Although the new record has its spacious moments, it’s more often a claustrophobic collage of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, whispery vocals, and enigmatic field recordings, sometimes layered up to 100 tracks deep. On first hearing, Twin Galaxies can seem the sonic encapsulation of a psychotic state, bearing at least superficial resemblance to the post-wig-out offerings of acid casualties Skip Spence and Syd Barrett. Further investigation, however, reveals that Hutzulak’s latest songs and soundscapes have been influenced by a different kind of disorientation: the sleeplessness, euphoria, and dread that go along with being a first-time father.

Baby Cosmo’s arrival has clearly had an impact on his music, in terms of both its emotional tone and his working method. New to Dixie’s Death Pool is a more explicit sweetness, as evinced in Twin Galaxies’ groggy-but-emotional opening track, “Air Signs”, which Hutzulak describes as being about seeing his son’s face for the first time, “like a folder full of possibilities”. The bemused mood continues on “Cancel My Subscription to the Moon”, which could be construed as what happens to dreamers when they collide with the here-and-now needs of parenting. Hutzulak quips that it’s also about giving up luxuries like The Wire magazine in order to afford diapers, but the grounding clearly goes deeper than that.

The retro-futurist mood of “Cancel My Subscription to the Moon” might also be a subtle allusion to some of the compromises Hutzulak has had to make now that his space-age bachelor pad in an off-Main artists’ building does double duty as a nursery. On the line from his day job at Vancouver Film School, he explains that while his physical confines have shrunk, his vision hasn’t.

“We’ve had a little bit of success in the studio, but I mostly work in my home, which is a one-room flat,” he says. “So if I was a bedroom recording artist before, I’m more like a bathroom recording artist now. A lot of it has to be done with headphones, direct-in kind of stuff, where baby’s asleep and I can work as long as I’m not waking him up.”

The result is a record that’s anything but an audio-verité experience. (And one, Hutzulak stresses, that’s best heard as it was made—while wearing headphones.) “One of the terms I use to describe my music is ‘dream country’, which is the name of a song as well,” he notes. “And I guess I’ve always related my music to movies as much as to other music. It’s about making spaces you can fall into—the creation of an illusionistic space, I guess. And escapism.”

Not all of Dixie’s Death Pool’s music is dreamy, however, with the new disc’s “Rainbow Bridge” verging on harsh noise—even if part of its sonic complexion is sourced from a fairly benign environment.

“If you’ve ever been to a play gym for little kids, you know what I’m talking about—those weekend mornings at the community centre on a rainy day where all of the kids in the neighbourhood get to go crazy together,” Hutzulak notes. “To some extent, that’s the feeling I wanted to create in the most chaotic moments of ‘Rainbow Bridge’.”

Starting with recordings of a free-improv jam session and his niece’s second birthday party, Hutzulak began riffing on the notion of destructive energy. “I just kind of went crazy, adding stuff into the mix to really go as maximal as I felt I could,” he admits. “Things just kind of came up by chance. Like, a neighbour happened to mention that a couple of houses were being torn down, so I headed up at that exact time with a field recorder. It was December 24th, so it was really quiet in the neighbourhood—and it was perfect. Beautiful Victorian houses with this big shovel car just cutting them down, with all these solid, dry, wooden boards splintering. It was foley gold.”

Some, it’s true, might find the result less than bright and shiny. “Rainbow Bridge” reveals Hutzulak’s ability to find more than a little manic glee in creative chaos, even if the artist himself is ready for a holiday from density, abstraction, and irritainment.

“That was a piece of work,” he says of Twin Galaxies’ cut-and-paste gestation. “And I’m really glad that it’s over, because I can’t wait to cut an album that at least has songs that are already written.

“I’m rehearsing that now,” he adds. “It’s not just me reworking field recordings—and it’s going to be amazing!”

Dixie’s Death Pool hosts a listening party for Twin Galaxies at China Cloud on Saturday (April 19) with guests Shades of Scorpius and the Sun Ra Star System.