Death doesn’t belong to heavy metal. Still, when it comes to the trappings of the musically macabre, no other musical genre can lay claim to as many skulls, headstones and coffins.

“You’re Dead!” is a refreshing exception to that rule.

The album by rapper Steve Ellison, who makes electronic music under the name Flying Lotus, is a lush, psychedelic meditation on the moment of death. And instead of metal’s heavy solos and haunted-house vibes, it’s filled with skewed hip-hop rhythms, jazz- inflected harmonies and alien-sounding electronic beats. His vision of the hereafter sounds more like Miles Davis than Black Sabbath.

Ellison’s take on the afterlife, however, isn’t completely comfortable either. His compositions are only a few minutes long but can involve jarring shifts, in which serene passages give way to inhuman pounding. The music is warm and mystical, but also tinged with a strangeness that sometimes borders on creepiness, a sensation perfectly captured on the album cover – Ellison’s exploding visage amid a trippy mandala littered with bloodied human forms (yet there’s nary a medieval font in sight).

In a phone interview from his Los Angeles home, Ellison doesn’t come across as a particularly somber guy. He sounds laid-back and easygoing, answering questions as he futzes in his garden. “I’m just trimming my weed plants,” he says nonchalantly.

The great-nephew of spiritual jazz great Alice Coltrane and the cousin of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, Ellison, 30, seemed destined for experimental-music greatness through his DNA. During the mid-2000s, he gained attention for his distinctively wiggly and liquid hip-hop tracks. The drum programming was groovy, but often so discombobulated that it seemed right on the edge of being out of rhythm. Since then, Ellison has released three records on the pioneering electronic label Warp, home to bizarro beat makers Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. The albums – “Los Angeles,” “Cosmogramma” and “Until the Quiet Comes” – are dense and strange, but their tone is generally sunshiny. So an entire album about the grave was unexpected.

“The thing is, at this point in my life, I have grown to think about death differently than a lot of people,” Ellison says. “I’ve had a lot of people pass in my life, you know, and I feel really connected to that experience. Obviously, I’ll miss the people who passed away in my life, but I don’t feel bad about it anymore. So, making the record was more like me coming to terms with death and my own mortality. I wanted to kind of laugh in the face of a concept that does frighten me a little bit. I tried to approach it in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. I didn’t want to be too serious. I wanted to be playful.”

Ellison’s earlier releases had deep roots in club music and hip-hop. For “You’re Dead!,” he used jazz as the launching point. Yet jazz is largely defined by spontaneous invention and group improvisation, not qualities that would seem to pair naturally with electronic and computer- programmed music, which thrives on rigorous micromanagement.

So instead of writing sheet music, Ellison worked one-on-one with various session musicians, coaching them toward rhythms he was interested in. Once those were recorded, he reshaped them in his studio and invited other musicians to add layers. He consciously limited the palette of sounds and samples to give the album a cohesive sound.

“I have these instruments. (I wanted it to sound) like it was all done in one breath – like it was all part of the same moment,” he says.

As for the afterlife, what’s it like?

“For me, man, what I imagine – and obviously this is all based on my imagination of what I think the end would be like – but I imagine it to be ... just another experience that no one will be able to tell you what it means,” Ellison says.

“It will probably be hella confusing at first, too – being stripped away of your ego and what you think you are, who you are. All that stuff. Maybe there’s this moment where you’re still trying to hold onto who you are and who you were. You can’t let go, but you’re forced to. I do imagine it to be a really jarring and confusing thing, to transition.”

However weird the journey, though, Ellison sees hope at its end.

“I wanted to kind of come to this place of understanding and acceptance,” he says. “Maybe we don’t die. Maybe we live on forever. The spirit lives on and influences on Earth. I think that’s the truth, though.

“One of the lessons I’ve learned about people passing in my life is that their influence becomes immortal. All the things we learned from them become concrete. And you hold them dear to you, and it affects the way you live and the way you treat people. I wanted to end on that sentiment, rather than a dark or a bleak idea.”