Funk has always concerned itself with liberation, and Dâm-Funk has long been an advocate for funk-as-freedom; he’d like nothing more than to lift your mind, your body, and your soul away from whatever’s holding it down.

“Free”, the closing track of Dâm’s wordless STFU EP, is a luxuriant ride from the boulevard to beyond the stratosphere. Over a bed of head-snap drums, twinkling Casios, and blunted bass, Dâm breezes down the block and off into the unknown. The eight-minute “Free” is a masterfully composed track, tidy as a cleanroom and filthy as a Black & Mild-stuffed ashtray, every chiming piano and wriggling keytar hanging, seemingly, in midair.

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More than that, though, it’s a testament to Dâm’s ability to make the music of the past—the mechanized precision of post-disco R&B and the subwoofer-decimating synths of left-coast g-funk—feel an awful lot like the future. It’s like the man said: Open up your funky mind, and you can fly.