Paul Schütze speaks in tongues. The composer channels the world’s musical languages into an Esperanto that whispers, chants, and screams to your soul. Schütze’s “Pacific Unrest” trilogy (Site Anubis is a new album; the two volumes of New Maps of Hell are re-edited and remastered versions of earlier releases) is an unsettling aural voyage through the urban landscape, where a lurking but indefinite tension rises through percussive repetition and dense sound-layering. (Considering Schütze’s expertise in implying visual imagery through aural trickery, it’s not surprising he began his career as a soundtrack composer, constructing mood pieces for such films as The Tale of Ruby Rose and Isabelle Eberhardt: The Oblivion Seeker.) The electronic scene is filling up with musicians like Loop Guru and Bally Sagoo who graft “ethnic” sounds onto techno beats, but their efforts rarely come across any better than insipidly feel-good worldbeat. Thankfully, Schütze has no allegiance to the rigid nature of dance music. The 39-year-old Australian launches his explorations of world music from his London base, and fears of colonialist cultural appropriation be damned: Schütze’s dedication to fourth-world possibilities has led him to study Indian drumming with Mani Datta, form the mixed-media and performance-art group Laughing Hands, and co-edit Deus Ex Machina, a design-theory publication that accompanied a traveling multimedia installation. New Maps of Hell introduces the elements that form the atmosphere of Schütze’s world: African drums, Middle Eastern drones, European art rock, and American jazz. The album’s watery cut-ups are sluiced via Schütze’s keyboard and samples (“Eating the First Map”), while its more muscular improvisations (“Topology of a Phantom City”) are beefed up by his intuitive small big band, which includes a trombonist, a guitarist, a bassist, two percussionists, and a drummer. The Rapture of Metals is Schütze solo and subdued. Where the first volume of New Maps merely touches on the dream state, Rapture rests firmly in the realm of slumber. Its themes range from the “Rapture of the Drowning” to “The Rapture of Ornament,” from the title track to the 21-minute psychic soaker “Sites of Rapture on the Lungs of God.” Site Anubis is the trilogy’s culmination, and an architectural masterpiece. Schütze invokes Miles Davis in his Agharta phase, as well as the drumcentric circularity of Talk Talk’s last two albums. More amazing is that this time the members of his band recorded their parts separately, in different parts of the world, with only rhythmic outlines to guide them. So Bill Laswell’s subaquatic dub-bass fights against former Herbie Hancock sideman Julian Priester’s honking trombone on “Eight Legs Out of Limbo,” and Finnish guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim battles with Belgian drummer Dirk Wachtelaer throughout, but the wars were entirely constructed by Schütze in his studio. It’s a seamless collection that sounds like the future of jazz: group improvisation constructing movable buildings that are torn down and redeveloped into, as one track is called, a “Ten Acre Ghost.” For Schütze, the city never sleeps, it creeps. —Christopher Porter