Laura Lee has one theory about why her band, Khruangbin, can sound like it’s from everywhere and nowhere at the same time: its latest record, Con Todo el Mundo, was created in an unusual location.

“We record in a barn,” the bassist reveals in a conference call from a Minneapolis–Saint Paul tour stop. “And when you listen to music, I think you are easily transported to where the music was recorded. Stuff that’s recorded in a studio, you can feel that the musicians are in a studio. Or if somebody’s rented out a church, you can hear the church. But I think that not a lot of music is made in a barn, so it feels maybe atmospheric or timeless or cinematic, in a way.”

“I would definitely agree with that,” says drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, who’s on another line. “I’ve heard a lot of people say that our music has a lot of space in it, and I think we can attribute that to the amount of space that’s out there in the field where we’re recording. I think that really comes out on the record.”

“Because there’s just hills and cows and space, it makes you relaxed—even though, technically, that record was recorded in freezing cold, so there was one aspect where we were very tense, physically,” Lee adds. “But the vibe was nothing but relaxed.”

When it comes to why Con Todo el Mundo comes across like sun-dazed surf one minute and gritty funk the next, however, or why Khruangbin would sound just as much at home in the streets of Chiang Mai as the salons of Paris, both Lee and Johnson defer to guitarist Mark Speer, who’s expected to join the call any minute.

“Mark’s the best person to answer that,” Lee says. “If I can get him on, he can rant on and on about this stuff.”

When he enters the conversation, Speer does not disappoint. The guitarist happily admits to being both a crate-digger and a musical tourist, with a special interest in pop music from the early stages of globalization, before corporate homogeneity took over the club scene.

“Right now I like to listen to funk from all over the world,” he explains. “And the thing is, it’s directly influenced by American culture; a lot of the time it’s James Brown and P-Funk. But it’s also very clearly from their region.…It’s mixing a local thing with this other culture that was coming up in dance clubs.

“If you go to a dance club in Turkey right now, you might hear the exact same shit you’d hear in a dance club in L.A. or New York—and I don’t really like that,” he adds. “I’d rather hear something that’s like, ‘Oh, man, I heard this record when I went overseas to visit, and I want to bring this style back and mix it with what we already do.’ Like, I want that cultural exchange to happen—and I don’t think there should be any rules about what you can or cannot pull from.”

That’s likely why so much of Khruangbin’s music sounds so untethered from genre or geographic norms—and yet the band’s aesthetic is strongly, if subliminally, rooted in a very specific time and place.

“In my community, growing up in Houston, Texas, that’s what we did,” Speer says. “I worked for a long time in hip-hop production, and the whole idea was to grab the wackest record you could think of, the lamest record, and then you’d clip it, you’d sample it and make it into something new—and you’d have to make it dope. That’s the challenge, right? It was remix culture, and that’s what we’re doing, too. The music we play is from everywhere—but without Houston, Khruangbin doesn’t sound like it does.”

Khruangbin plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday (April 27).