He’s no Superman, although being a member of English dance-pop sensation the xx is a superpower of sorts.

Like the Man of Steel, though, the electronic artist born Jamie Smith has built himself a Fortress of Solitude, albeit in busy London rather than the empty wastes of the Arctic. Fortress Studios is where Smith goes when he wants to transform into Jamie xx—and where most of his solo debut, In Colour, was recorded.

The “studios” part is apparently a misnomer. “It’s a very small room with windows out onto the street,” Smith explains, reached at a Chicago tour stop. “So it’s, like, natural daylight, and I can just reach everything in the room from my chair. It makes life very easy, and I don’t have very much equipment. I like to keep it as simple as possible.”

Conventionally, bed-sit record-makers like to claim that they can easily get huge sounds out of tiny spaces. Smith, who seems constitutionally incapable of anything approaching self-aggrandizement, doesn’t—and in fact In Colour is very clearly an album built in the computer, probably with its creator wearing headphones. It’s a reserved and rather internal effort, although this can be interpreted in a number of ways, perhaps predicated as much on the listener’s location as on its creator’s intent.

Heard in the middle of a cedar forest on a Gulf Island, for instance, it seems a drifty, dreamy affair, a slightly spacey voyage through the lonely mind of a young musician. Revisited in a first-floor apartment on one of Vancouver’s busiest corners, it transforms into the kind of noise urban singles might want to put on before heading out for a night of clubbing.

In Colour isn’t mutable by design, however. “I didn’t have anything in mind, really,” the laconic Smith says. “I was just sort of making it from the time and place I was making it in, which was mostly either on the road, as escapism, or in the studio.”

He’s pleased, though, that at least one listener has picked up on In Colour’s dreamscape vibe: being able to enter that zone is a big part of why he was attracted to music in the first place.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get into that space,” he admits, “but that’s when I enjoy it the most.”

Smith also appears to enjoy interdisciplinary art. This year, the 26-year-old soundtracked choreographer Wayne McGregor’s ballet Tree of Codes, which made its debut at the Manchester International Festival.

As part of the National Gallery’s Soundscapes initiative, he created a score to accompany the Belgian neo-impressionist Théo van Rysselberghe’s painting Coastal Scene.

(Fittingly, the work itself is a nuanced study in blue and grey, memorable more for its shimmering textures than for its immediate impact.)

He also crafted In Colour’s rainbow-hued cover art and its booklet, in which each song is represented by a different pigment—magenta for the reggae-Motown mashup “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”; chartreuse for the midtempo “Hold Tight”; a slightly greenish yellow for “SeeSaw”, which features vocals from Smith’s xx bandmate Romy Madley Croft.

“I guess they just conjure up colour for me, songs,” Smith says. “It’s always been like that. It’s not like synesthesia or anything; it’s just an idea that I have of the shade or the colour that a song is as I’m making it.”

Those interested in attending Smith’s upcoming Vancouver performance will be interested to know that in this DJ set, he’ll generally be painting in primary colours—and playing some rare tracks he picked up while in Washington, D.C.

“I just bought a bunch of Baltimore records from the early ’90s that sound interesting—some records that weren’t very well known, I guess,” he explains, and although he’s cagey about who, exactly, made those discs, he thinks they’ve got dance-floor potential. “They sound as gritty as some of the U.K. dance music from that era.”

Making music for dancing, not dreaming, is definitely Smith’s intent when it comes to live performance. “I’m playing a lot of sort of regular music venues, and I’m trying to turn them into as much of a club experience as possible,” he says. “Focusing not necessarily on who’s on-stage, but more what’s happening in the crowd.”

Jamie xx plays the Commodore Ballroom on Thursday (July 23).