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It’s hard to say what, exactly, local musician Arrison Kirby expected when he jetted off on a trip to Japan, but what he found ended up ruining his trip.

One good thing came out of the journey, however — “Part 3,” the third solo album from the El Deth Records founder, local producer and musician extraordinaire who has his hands in more projects than Rick Rubin.

“Part 3,” released this week, was inspired by that ill-fated sojourn, and while Kirby is hesitant to go into explicit details, he doesn’t hold back what he thinks of the Land of the Rising Sun and what he experienced there.

“A lot of it’s kind of personal, but pretty much, I went over there with an idea that was more or less shattered because I pretty much did some things the wrong way,” Kirby told The Daily Times this week. “Ultimately, I went over there not having a lot of experience in the language, and I had a completely different idea about the culture. It was disillusioning more than anything. There was some obvious alienation while I was over there, along with some racism, and some things that really ended up putting a sour taste in my mouth for the whole thing.”

Leave it to Kirby, however, to turn it into something positive. It was on the leg of his journey through Nagoya, Nagano and Tokyo that the songs for “Part 3” were first conceptualized and written. By capturing various urban soundscapes along the way that he would later bring into the studio, Kirby infuses “Part 3” with an ethereal, dream-like disorientation that sounds like the state of mind of a stranger in a strange land.

“I actually wrote the songs while I was over there, and even though I didn’t bring any instruments, I wrote down the lyrics and memorized the melodies and recorded a lot of live sound — sort of like field recordings,” he said. “The idea was kind of to submerge the project in that trip. I had the order of the songs and the lyrics completely planned out by the time I got home. And once I got back, I was feeling pretty crappy from the experience, so I exorcised it by going down to the studio and putting it down one song at a time.”

In a way, “Part 3” is a sonic sketchbook, filled with the odds and ends of a man who collects sounds and tones and music the way any other tourist might bring back trinkets and T-shirts and shot glasses. Samples have always played heavily into Kirby’s work, but they do so less here as on previous albums. Instead, Kirby focuses on the tonal arrangements of the songs, using a variety of instruments to build a pastiche of songs — some lyrical, some instrumental — that go from merry abandon to methodically plodding to downright oppressive. It’s an atmospheric record, and the journey from elation to disappointment to relief at the journey’s end is palpable.

The trip began, he said, swimmingly — he found a ticket for $400, and he had two friends in separate cities with whom he could stay. But when he departed from each, he found himself submerged in a place that was as unfamiliar as it was occasionally off-putting.

“Leaving the rocks that I had there really put my mind in a bad place, and when I got to Tokyo, it ended up being completely different from what the American perception of what Japan is — this silly goofy, quirky place where everybody is having a good time,” he said. “Instead, I found a lot of rude, cigarette-smoking 20-somethings on cell phones. I don’t want to dog a whole nation by any means, but it’s not a good place for a person who doesn’t know the language to get lost.

“And I did get lost. I couldn’t even find my hotel at one point. Four days in, I was totally ready to come home. The primary thing is that I went over there very unprepared, and I had a real difficult time getting around and understanding anything.”

For a guy whose methodical work ethic in the local music scene has made him something of a pioneer, it was an experience that certainly made an impact. Kirby considers himself to be a producer and “sound artist” more than anything else, and he’s been active in the local music scene for more than a decade as the founder of El Deth Records and its accompanying studio. He’s produced such local bands as Skippy and the Bell Bottoms and Hamilton Ellis; her performs as a solo musician and as a member of Obadiah; and he’s currently involved in a local hip-hop collective called Flash Mob.

He’s not a mogul, by any means — El Deth hasn’t made him rich, but it has given him the sort of creative freedom he enjoys.

“There’s not been much money made in El Deth; some, but definitely not a profit as expensive as things are to put out,” he said. “It’s not the most profitable thing, but I believe that if you do it long enough, you do find your sea legs and start making a living at it. I pretty much know what I’m doing, and whether it makes me a millionaire or a thousandaire is irrelevant.

“I enjoy the process of creation and having enough units available to give a free one away. It’s more or less about just getting it out there and having these Web sites and the whole structure that’s built around these projects.”

“Part 3” is the first Arrison Kirby record to materialize in physical form. His previous two releases were Internet-only downloads, primarily because of his heavy use of samples. (By giving away the music for free, he has to pay no royalties to the original artists for sampling their work, as he makes no profits on shaping them into his own creations.)

“With this one, I stepped away from the samples and started from scratch with actual songwriting,” he said. “It was a degree of piecing things together like a puzzle, but there’s always this base that was the written song. Even when I work with samples, everything’s been from scratch — from the initial pairing of beats or whatever — but with this one, it was pretty rigid. It was definitely more about tonal arrangements and working everything together. Instead of taking something and just building it out of nowhere, it came directly out of my head.”