It's entirely possible that nobody represents the permeability of circa-now pop music better than Cashmere Cat. Cashmere Cat is Magnus August Høiberg, a Norwegian producer who started off his musical career as a battle DJ. (As a teenager, under the name DJ Final, he competed in four straight DMC World DJ Championships.) About five years ago, he reemerged as a SoundCloud producer, a remix specialist who piled euphoric melodic pings and wobbles all over big pop and rap hits. And this somehow led him to start making big pop and rap hits a couple of years later. In the past few years, Cashmere Cat has produced tracks for people like Ariana Grande and the Weeknd and Charli XCX and Tinashe. He co-produced Kanye West's "Wolves." And he bent his style to meet these different artists in the middle, accommodating their own sounds while still importing his own frantic fizziness. So that's why he now gets to give us 9, an album packed full of ultra-famous guest stars that nevertheless works as an extended pop-music goof. The whole story of the guy's career is like an '80s comedy, a prank that somehow spiraled out of control and became real.