Despite having provided the soundtrack for Al Gore’s global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth , Michael Brook has never actually met the man who should have been the 43rd president of the United States.

“I was at a party he was at, but we weren’t introduced,” Brook says ruefully, reached at home in L.A. “But I am a big fan of his. I just think he’s great.”

Soft-spoken and thoughtful, the Toronto-born guitarist and producer is not the kind of person who would push his way past a phalanx of federal agents in order to press the flesh with his idol. But he has made actual contact with a variety of other celebrities, starting with A-list producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, with whom he apprenticed.

For his latest release, RockPaper Scissors , Brook twined ambient music, radio-friendly pop, progressive rock, and Middle Eastern melodies into a sound so lush and evocative it’s almost filmic. And the disc has already given birth to further hybrid forms, as its maker happily explains. To begin with there’s his live show, which not only employs multi-instrumentalist Lisa Germano and violinist Julie Rogers, but also draws heavily on the imagery of American artist Aaron Koblin.

“He’s done this beautiful piece called Flight Patterns ,” says Brook, whose on-stage responsibilities include bass, guitar, and drum programming. “Essentially, he took data from the FAA of flight paths of airplanes across the U.S., and he animated it. Eventually it sort of outlines a map of the U.S., just through the way people travel. And there’s something very moving about it, maybe because each one of those dots is an airplane full of people going somewhere to do something. There’s something very human about it—which sounds contradictory, because it’s really just a bunch of little animated dots moving across a screen.”

Collaboration is important to Brook, not only because he enjoys working with artists from other disciplines and musicians from other cultures, but also because he enjoys being surprised.

“A lot of the best art comes from conflict,” he contends. “Like in the Beatles, they all had different tastes and they disagreed about things, but it was the combination of those contrasting and conflicting elements that created something strong. I think that’s why I like collaborating so much: other people just do stuff you wouldn’t do, you don’t know how to do, or you just wouldn’t have thought of.”

The next album from Brook is another joint effort, but one in which he almost completely ceded creative control. Laid up after a bicycle acci ­ent in which he broke his collarbone, he gave the RockPaperScissors master tapes to remix wizard James Hood, who has turned them into an hourlong dreamscape.

“I had sort of thought of doing it myself, and who knows what that would have been,” Brook says of this as-yet-untitled effort, which will be available for purchase at his upcoming concert dates. “But I just think he’s done an incredible job.”

Michael Brook plays St. James Community Hall on Sunday (January 28).