Last year, Rory Ferreira, the Maine-based indie-rap great formerly known as Milo, emerged with a new alias, R.A.P. Ferreira, and released an excellent album called Purple Moonlight Pages. Today Ferreira announced plans to follow that LP with another new one that’ll be out on New Year’s Day. This one looks like it’ll be a departure — a full-album salute to the late performance artist and beat poet Bob Kaufman.

Kaufman, a Black man born in New Orleans, may have been the person to coin the term “beatnik.” Kaufman studied at the New School, served in the Merchant Marines, converted to Buddhism, and lived most of his life in San Francisco, where he helped found the poetry magazine Beatitude. He was also arrested, imprisoned, and committed many times. In 1963, Kaufman took a vow of silence after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and he kept it until the end of the Vietnam War a decade later. He died in 1986.

Kaufman developed an improvisatory, jazz-based form of poetry, and it’s not hard to see how it could’ve been an influence on R.A.P. Ferreira. Ferreira calls his new album bob’s son: R​.​A​.​P. Ferreira in the garden level cafe of the scallops hotel an “ode” to Kaufman. Ferreira produced the entire LP under his Scallops Hotel alias. Ferreira has shared the album’s opening track “battle report,” a collaboration with his fellow New England DIY rapper Pink Navel. It’s more of a spoken-work piece than a rap song. Check it out below.

bob’s son: R​.​A​.​P. Ferreira in the garden level cafe of the scallops hotel is out 1/1 on Ferreira’s Ruby Yacht label.