Kareem Ali has big dreams. We're walking through the courtyard of the Arizona Science Center in downtown Phoenix, and the ultra-prolific house producer and trumpet player is telling me about future plans for his label, CosmoFlux. "I want to reshape CosmoFlux as a non-profit," he says. "I want to do sober day parties and gear the music towards the youth, especially Black and brown youth. I'd like to set up a community center with drum machines and instruments. It's all in the baby stages."

There's a strong basis for these lofty ambitions. Back in June, Pitchfork contributing editor Philip Sherburne got hip to the music Ali was self-releasing on his Bandcamp page. He awarded "Night Echoes"—one of nearly 150 tracks Ali put out last year—the vaunted "Best New Music'' designation. Ali's career went into overdrive. Well, inasmuch as a musician's career can flourish during a global pandemic when venues are shuttered, festivals are canceled and touring is impossible.

A Rolling Stone profile followed. Ali signed to the Hollywood power agency WME (Endeavor), joining a roster that includes Adele, Bruno Mars and Childish Gambino. Prior to the pandemic, most of Ali's live performances involved playing trumpet at weddings, funerals and such. With this increased attention, Ali was able to leave his job at a golf company and concentrate on music full-time. "It's what I worked for, for a long time," he tells me. "Everything's kind of lining up."

Nothing about Ali's path to dance music has been typical. The son of a homicide detective and Nation Of Islam minister, Ali gravitated towards music in his early years, when he spent weekends in the mosque. He began playing trumpet, absorbing jazz and blues as well as the Nation's message of Black empowerment. "The discipline of the Nation is who I am now. Black history, Black empowerment, that wasn't taught in the traditional educational system. Obviously, in my music, that's a major factor there."

NOI tenets of discipline and self-improvement were reflected in Ali's dedication to the trumpet. He'd attend conservatory at SUNY Purchase for a couple years until, like many visionaries before him, he soured on the constraints of the institution. Already starting to pick up on programs like Fruity Loops, his love of outré jazz and sci-fi led him to the music and Afrofuturist cosmology of Sun Ra. One night, while immersed in the Arkestra and Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks, Ali searched "space music" and came across a live show from Chicago's high-tech jacking house unit Innerspace Halflife. Blown away, he made a track influenced by what he'd heard and sent it to Hakim Murphy, one-half of the duo.

"Kareem contacted and sent me a track that he made using major 7th chords," Murphy told me via email. "This tune sounded similar to one of our Innerspace Halflife tracks. So I started looking at his social media and noticed that he played trumpet. I then listened to more of his tunes, and I felt that playing the trumpet would always give a fresh element to his music. I saw that he was an excellent and diverse musician that was into jazz. So translating the jazz composition mentality into electronic music would be easy for him."

Murphy and Ali struck up a casual mentor-mentee relationship, with the former schooling the latter on the Black, Midwestern roots of dance music. "I didn't know," Ali tells me. "Finding out [that the roots of dance music are Black] through Hakim really expanded my mind." Murphy put out Ali's first dance music release, Nocturnal Respiration, but it wasn't his time yet. He continued to refine his style while working various jobs at restaurants and on golf courses. Many of the tracks he made over the past five years are just now seeing the light of day on Bandcamp.

But Murphy's hunch was right. The musical knowledge Ali accrued over countless hours studying jazz imbues his dance tracks with a versatile musicality. For an artist who has largely developed on their own, away from the club, Ali demonstrates an uncanny fluency with various tempos and styles. "Be With Me" is an earworm house track that plays to Ali's unique strengths, combining deep house chords, exuberant arpeggios, his own airy vocal and an accomplished trumpet solo. "Galactic Expressway" is Detroit-style melodic techno, while tracks like "I Love You So Much," apply his breezy, deep melodicism to a 160-BPM breakbeat. In Ali's rapidly expanding body of work, there are echoes of Larry Heard, Kyle Hall and Stefan Ringer, the Atlanta artist whose off-the-cuff vocal style Ali credits as a major influence. It's no wonder this timeless combination of spaced-out R&B and classic deep house caught the attention of major agencies and critics.

Though Ali left the church as a teenager, he still regularly retweets the controversial head of the Nation Of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and recently revealed he'd lost friends and opportunities over the years due to his affiliation with NOI. In assessing Ali's respect, if not strict adherence, to the religion, I'm reminded of a quote from the novelist Leon Forrest, the last non-Muslim editor of the Nation Of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks, which I share with Ali. "Any number of whites who knew I worked for the Nation Of Islam would say, 'You know I really admire the Muslims.' And it was because it represents all the old American values of thrift and hard work, discipline, respect for the family and the women. Keep to yourself. Build small businesses..." Ali reflects these values on tracks like "Black Woman (Mother Of Civilization)" and seems to address his stance directly on "Be Inspired(Survive)." "Now I'm not a Muslim, but I agree with some of the things they say," goes a spoken-world sample. "And if Allah helps him be a better man than Jesus, then I'm all for it."

This pious attitude is also reflected in his dim view of dance music's hand-in-hand relationship with hedonism. He refers to what he's seen happen backstage at clubs with palpable aversion, though he also emphasizes a "to each their own" approach. Rather than seeking to proselytize or change the culture, Ali wants to offer an uplifting alternative, both with his music and the aforementioned sober day parties. He speaks of taking cues, both production-wise and in terms of Bandcamp prolificacy, from Stones Throw's post-Dilla star producer Knxwledge. When I ask Ali, who has produced a number of excellent downtempo tracks, if he'd consider working with rappers, he says he'd only work with an MC if he agreed with their message, perhaps referring to current chart rap's preoccupation with sex and drug use. "You gotta push that positive with the negative," he says.

This might give you the impression that Ali is a devout, serious young man, summoning the image of the bespectacled, bow tie-sporting NOI acolyte. In fact, Ali walks up to my car wearing an X-Files "Truth Is Out There" shirt. He's tweeted about his love for riding bicycles while listening to music, something I love as well, so I suggest we go for a ride on a trail by the Salt River.

I pick Ali up at his house in an unassuming apartment complex set against the backdrop of a spectacular sandstone rock formation near Scottsdale. We drive through Phoenix's martian landscape and get our bikes off the rack. As we ride alongside each other, Ali excitedly holds forth on a dizzying array of passions—Radiohead, OPN's scores for the Safdie brothers, Kaytranada's ability to bring a slowed-down house sound to the masses, No Man's Sky, Gundam, Pépé Bradock and Ennio Morricone's score for The Thing, to name a few. When he's not making music, Ali's listening, watching and playing, avid study that he's using to construct his own artistic mythos.

"My dad used to say it's beyond the music. Study the artists that you idolize. Get into their mind," he says, before chuckling, adding that many of them are crazy. This knowledge comes out in casual anecdotes. About James Mtume sparring with the crowd while Miles debuted revolutionary electric material. About his pilgrimage to the A Great Day In Harlem stairs. About how he bought a VIP ticket to a John Carpenter show, hoping to meet the horror legend and how his shared birthday with Frankie Knuckles feels, to him, like destiny.

The conversation keeps returning to Phoenix, the desert city of wide-open spaces he feels has put him in the mindset to create. He talks about the Gorillaz collaboration with Bobby Womack, "Bobby In Phoenix," which starts with the hook "Let's talk about Phoenix / It's got a way of helping you to breathe a little better." Ali, who has asthma, tells me this is scientifically accurate. One of his best tracks, "Lesser Speeds," refers to the different pace of living in the desert. But this is an exceedingly strange time to blow up. Normally, a breakthrough year would lead to a whirlwind tour of airports and green rooms. Ali, who will focus on live sets, tells me he'd like to play with artists who have become friends, like MoMA Ready and AceMo, who he sees as part of a new wave of Black artists reclaiming dance music.

Ali's first international tour, which was canceled due to the pandemic, would have had him playing in South Africa. "I have a lot of fans in South Africa," he says before stating his desire to use his music to build Pan-African unity. "I want to bridge the gap between Black Africans and Black Americans. There's such a disconnect... we have a lot in common. I think Black people are one of the most disunited groups in the country, the world in general. We may speak different languages, different dialects, but we're all the same people. We gotta settle our differences, come together and build something."

Black Power is the defining theme in Ali's catalogue. The track "A Full And Complete Freedom" features the sing-songy hook, "All the Black people get up and be free." On "Black Power," Ali speaks resolutely, "One love, Black People, Black Power," ending with an interview from James Brown on Black Power, recorded after Martin Luther King's assassination.

Speaking on his long standing interest in science fiction, Ali connects the Drexciyan mythos to the Dogon tribe's intricate knowledge of star systems in just a couple of sentences. Everything we've discussed so far—religion, music, Black Power, science fiction—fit together seamlessly in his worldview.

When we speak about the future, the purgatorial nature of the present snaps into focus. Ali has remixed Caribou and will work with Bradley Zero's Rhythm Section label on a release. A triple-vinyl compilation of key material from over the past couple years, Essentials, will be released on his label later this year. Between our interview in late February and the time of publishing, he drops one of his best EPs yet, Getting Through. Yet there's the creeping feeling that Ali's music career, thus far, is virtual. The fans paying Ali's rent via Bandcamp are real, but he's played just a handful of club gigs thus far. Is Ali ready for the main stage at a European festival?

A live set for Boiler Room seems to put these questions to rest. Over an hour, Ali plays a thrilling live set, careening through live renditions that highlight the best of his recent work. Ali, wearing a blue du-rag, lays down MIDI keyboard solos in front of the saguaro cacti as the sun sets on a remote ranch outside Phoenix. Night falls. By the time he plays his final song, an appropriately cosmic instrumental, shooting stars traverse the Arizona night sky, a deep shade of blue dotted with constellations and nebulae.

Back on earth, Ali and I pull our bikes up on the side of the river, looking towards downtown and out into the distance, towards another sunset. We continue to discuss the future in this odd, speculative manner. Ali is ambitious, but not in the self-aggrandizing manner you're used to. We speak about his desire to put Phoenix on the map and circle back to his plans for CosmoFlux as both a label and a music-focused community organization for Black and brown kids. "It's about creating something bigger than myself," Ali says, staring over the water. "I don't need to be remembered."