The pop-soul superfreak now known to so many as Jamie Lidell — a little bit Prince, a little bit Motown and a little bit rave — emerged somewhat unexpectedly last year, fully formed, from a cocoon of angular experimental techno. A high-pressure remix project coaxed the secret soul-soaked pop brother out of Lidell's glitchy techno-nerd shell. Under pressure to deliver the goods in just three days, he found himself reworking Matthew Herbert's "The Audience" in a Motown kind of groove.

It felt so good, so right, that Lidell followed the project with an entire album of full-on, soulful pop music. Multiply, released on the United Kingdom's infamous Warp Records imprint, was one of the finest examples of summer groove to float out car windows in the sunny months of 2005.

"It's a heavy comedown," Lidell says of the transition from underground techno producer to soul man. "Something like cold turkey. There's a period of self-loathing followed by intense elation. Once this subsides, one exists in a semipermanent bubble of pop. Two hunks of bubblegum, a sip of honey, and you're halfway there."

Awkward as the transition may have felt at first, Lidell has been surfing that honey wave around the world for the past year. Music critics can't get enough of Multiply, and Lidell is regularly throwing down live shows that confuse, delight and reduce some of them to slobbering fans.

Clips from a forthcoming DVD of one of the burgeoning pop star's live performances at the Royal Festival Hall in London show a frenetic human beatboxing machine bobbing over a laptop and mixing board, slinging percussive vocal chops every which direction, and singing over an army of himself overdubbed on the fly. The grooves from Multiply are recognizable but mutated and intensified — clean pop gems dirtied up and flung feverishly around the room.

Lidell describes it this way: "I would liken my show to being in a barrel and falling off a mighty isolated platform into a pool of cool, glistening silver-topped water. Upon landing, you're surrounded by an ever-present wash of harmonious noise that both soothes and invigorates. It's not bubblebath, though, even if it sounds like it. Don't forget you're in a barrel. I am outside but somehow inside. It's not a guru thing, don't worry, and you walk away just like you always did. Turn on the TV and it just seems like a dream."

Lidell's bizarre description evokes the happy confusion so often referenced by those who have experienced the show in person: You're unsure what just happened or whether it meant anything at all, but you can't help but love him for it.

As if Lidell's mind weren't warped enough to fill a venue on its own, he employs partner-in-crime Pablo Fiasco's talents to ensure that audience members' heads are thoroughly done in. The designer and video programmer outfits Lidell in "media suits," which often involve a lot of double-sided tape and a variety of decorative objects clinging to his frame, and keeps a slew of images flashing up on the screen behind the singer at all times. Sometimes he fits Lidell with a helmet on which Fiasco has mounted a camera so audience members can behold the singer's face from the rim of his hat, cut to his entire body from a distance, and mix it up with the cityscapes and organic scenes flashing behind him in rapid succession.

In an interview last year, Lidell attempted to explain the relationship between the album and live versions of his songs with a confectionary metaphor: "It's chocolates versus cake. I like 'em both, but the album is a morning hot chocolate. The cake is a different beast. I would never eat a layer cake in the morning. I never play in the morning. I'm not saying that I wouldn't consider a pain au chocolat in the morning. But a fancy cake ... that's for when the lights go down. You get me?"