The eight-minute track that follows, "Middle Finger Music," moves through menaced verses and curses over the type of automaton beat that Kraftwerk would factory stamp with approval before being overtaken by abstract daydreams and nightmares. Crying gulls and King Tubby–like dub motifs flicker through the song's lonely, vast inner and outer space as Jones near-whispers the titular words to himself, his voice multitracked into a self-harassing chorus. Here, and on the gloomily humorous next song, "Vultures" (sample lines: "They circle-dive inside my dome ... They never leave my ass alone"), paranoia pervades the atmosphere, which Jones renders like the imaginative painter he happens to be when he isn't making music.

As a writer and singer, Jones possesses many voices, and if on "Middle Finger Music" he both listens to them and claims they'll lead him to his doom, there and elsewhere on Dislocated Genius they yield extraordinary results. This recording's avant-reaches have bewildered some club music writers who know of Jones strictly as the name behind a pair of sublime and relatively straightforward — if poetic — soulful house-inflected singles, "I Don't Know" and "One and One." On those tracks (as well as another mathematics-of-love number, "49 Percent," recorded with Röyksopp), Jones's voice trembles and swoons like that of Off the Wall–era Michael Jackson — that is, when he isn't more freely vamping like a diva. Describing a movie-ready tearful good-bye by train tracks, "I Don't Know”’s vocal outdoes some of the sensational male testifying of early Chicago house: Jones laughs bitterly to himself and seems to cradle his own pain while reaching deep into his chest for low notes as he feels a — that word again — "burn" in describing his crushed passion. He can also do butch swagger — witness the quarrelsome and smart (rather than daft) punk of "L.A. Mattress."