How do you get Tom Waits, George Clinton, Ghostface Killah, Santogold and M.I.A. to visit a Los Angeles studio located in an alley once inhabited by crackheads? If you're Sam Spiegel, you tell them you're out to make one hell of a party-starting record. Since 2003, the New York native — along with his Brazilian pal Ze "DJ Zegon" Gonzales — has teamed up with some of the biggest names in rap and rock for the debut record from his project N.A.S.A. "This record is about bringing the craziest combination of people together," says Spiegel of the record, which also features guest spots from David Byrne, Santogold and Kanye West. "It's about people from totally different worlds, just like Zegon and I come from different worlds."

Spirit of the Apollo, due out next February, is one of the most ambitious and adventurous records in recent years. The 16-track set features jams that mash up bhangra grooves with funky guitars ("Whachadoin?") and jazz-organ grinds with marching-band beats ("There's a Party"). But the bat-shit vocal collaborations steal the show. The atmospheric stomp "Spacious Thoughts" mashes Waits' grizzled growl with rapper Kool Keith's snappy bark. And the disco-funk jam "Strange Enough" is just that: Ol' Dirty Bastard rapping about Bugle Boy Jeans as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O plays the role of hook girl (Spiegel worked on her band's 2006 album Show Your Bones). "When we started five years ago, we wrote up this dream list of people on a dry-erase board," says Spiegel. "We ended up getting 80 percent of them and were like, 'I can't believe we're filling this dry-erase board up!"

Spiegel has always been obsessed with divergent styles of music. As a teen growing up in Manhattan in the early Nineties, he would spin Tribe Called Quest records at high school parties. And his brother — director Spike Jonze — cued him into alt-rock gurus like the Pixies. "I've always had an eclectic taste," he says. "And I was always getting a lot of musical advice from my brother."

In 2005, Spiegel scored his first big breakthrough when he collaborated with Karen O on the hushed ballad "Hello Tomorrow," which was later featured in an Adidas commercial and topped the iTunes singles chart. Since then, he's gone on to score hip-hop and orchestral songs for Nike and Converse commercials. And he's currently cutting new albums with Philadelphia MC Spank Rock and composing the soundtrack to David O Russell's forthcoming movie Nailed. But there's one project he?s reluctant to discuss: the much-anticipated Karen O solo record, which Spiegel produced. "Whenever I talk about it she wants to kill me," he jokes, adding that it will come out sometime in the near future. "She put a hit out on me once. And I begged her to take it off." KEVIN O'DONNELL

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