A DJ/production duo numbering Squeak E. Clean (AKA Sam Spiegel, brother of film-maker Spike Jonze, and an itinerant New Yorker with enviable connections within the music industry) and DJ Zegon (a Brazilian turntablist Spiegel met and bonded with at a party in the Hollywood Hills), N.A.S.A.'s acronym spells out North And South America, announcing the border-demolishing intentions of their star-studded debut album from the off. The record boasts collaborations with Kool Keith, KRS ONE, Chuck D, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Spankrock, E-40 and more Wu bangers than you could find at a Staten Island kung-fu convention: not that The Spirit Of Apollo limits its cultural embrace to the Americas. Reggae godhead Sizzla invited the producers to his Judgement Yard compound to record A Volta with Lovefoxxx of Brazilian electro kooks CSS adding extra vocals, and, not content with just the one Swedish indie ingénue, Spiegel and Zegon rope in both Lykke Li and Nina Persson.

Their debut album is an audaciously all-star event, suggesting Spiegel owns a seriously huge address book; more impressive than the mere starpower of N.A.S.A.’s guestlist, however, is the seemingly fevered (but unforced) eclecticism of the album’s couplings (and triplings, and quadruplings). Hip hop luminaries rub shoulders with wayward rock legends; indie-pop starlets duke it out with Shaolin soldiers; globe-trotting world-pop visionaries provide choruses for Brazilian firebrands and sulphur-spitting rappers. It’s tempting to picture Spiegel and Zegon as two kids sitting in a sandpit, joyfully pitching actions figures from different universes against each other: He-Man tussling with Darth Vader, GI Joe receiving a critical beatdown from Barbie.

If your gut response is to recoil from so polymorphously perverse a concept, you’re forgetting that blending such a riot of influences has always been the point of hip hop - the way it harvests the best of myriad crops to create a devastating compound. That this swarming album holds together so well is tribute to Spiegel and Zegon’s tasteful production, building tracks that are clean, bright, hook-laden and uncluttered enough to let the vocalists shine. Indeed, the tracks themselves would soon bore as instrumentals, but that’s the point: they’re the glue that holds the unlikely partnerships together, background not foreground (and entirely fine with that).

It’s the chemistry within these partnerships that impress the most. Happily, not only is the selection of ...Apollo’s cast list inspired, but the guests themselves are on inspired form. Case in point: this writer has never warmed to Chali 2na’s verbals, his flow forever sounding like someone had just cut the power to the turntable, his vocals so slooow and looooow. Partnered with Blackalicious emcee Gift Of Gab (a man with a brilliantly elastic sense of timing) on The People Tree, however, he’s perfect, as is the aching, arch chorus from Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts maverick David Byrne. And as foil to an audibly gleeful George Clinton on the aptly-titled There’s a Party, he’s never sounded looser, funnier, better.

The Wu represent in strong numbers across the tracks: Meth forms a brutal duo with E-40 on N.A.S.A. Music; RZA delivers a devastating verse that detonates the mournful groove carved by vocalist Barbie Hatch and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante on Way Down; on The Mayor, meanwhile, Ghostface heads up a none-more-tough tag-team that unites emcees from the East (GFK himself), the South (Scarface), and the Bit in the Middle (Chicagoans The Cool Kids). Even Ol’ Dirty raises his posthumous head on the woozy Strange Enough, lacing together dusted and comedic rhymes with kindred wayward-spirit Fatlip, as Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O endearingly tries her best not to giggle through the hook. Remember Big Baby Jesus this way: mic in hand, having hells of fun, and wanting to share it with whoever happens to be listening in.

Not all the partnerships between people or themes are so unlikely: the maddeningly-catchy Wachadoin?, uniting indie dancefloor faves Spankrock, MIA, Santogold and YYY axe-man Nick Zinner over a vaguely Baile funk beat, makes so much sense one can’t imagine why Diplo hadn’t thought of it before, and getting Chuck D to rhyme about what's wrong with the economy on Money would be the dictionary definition of a no-brainer, were it not for the PE icon's indomitable common sense. But there’s no doubt that this album is at its best when slinging together artists from entirely different universes, when it strains (and succeeds) to make the most distant and daffy connections.

Hidden ten or so minutes into the CD’s final track, Electric Flowers is one such example, colossal beats and eerie strings scoring a psychedelic hip hop lament, The Cardigans’ Nina Persson playing torch-song siren to RZA, who delivers his vocal with a focus and force that could re-arrange constellations. Gifted, meanwhile, allies icy electro-pop, sweeping synth-funk, Santogold, Swedish indie-pop singer Lykke Li and Kanye West (at his super-confident best, a track obviously recorded before his recent vocoder-aided descent into gloom) for a heady cocktail that, for all its evident contradictions, makes for brilliantly radio-ready pop.

The most distant and daffiest of the album’s connections, though - the most unlikely of its partnerings - is also the album’s standout track. In the blue corner, Kool Keith, a man long established as being Not Like Others, a linguistic alchemist whose couplets can rewire minds at a dozen paces. In the red corner, Tom Waits, barfly poet with a gravely growl and a penchant for subterranean brilliance. On Spacious Thoughts they fulfil N.A.S.A.’s potential best, both inhabiting similarly bizarre, darkly twisted lyrical worlds, Waits’ charred bark easily a match for Keith’s unstoppable flows of illogic.

It shouldn’t work, but it did. And so runs the story for much of this fine album, where risks are generously rewarded and where the rules are broken with a seductive glee. Like the rocket namechecked in the album-title, N.A.S.A. are up in the stars, gazing down on the world’s music. From that vantage point it all makes some kind of sense, and for the hour or so this album spins, it’s a perspective they succeed in sharing.