Shortly after moving to Baltimore three years ago, Ian Mugerwa, who records muted and experimental R&B under the name Dawuna , suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Effectively bedridden, he was unable to make music for a year. When he did sit down to write and record what would become African Family Laptop Musick , made in his earliest recovery phases and released this past summer, then-undiagnosed amnesia meant he was only able to commit fragments of it to memory.

Where that release was a refashioning of the creative groove, a semi-conscious catharsis, Love’s Arp , his fourth album, is a more intentional and considered record—one almost impossible in its ambition.…