Flying Lotus
Life beyond your own life
In the summer of 2010, a coworker named Brendan complained to me that he couldn’t find a torrented version of Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma where the track times lined up with those on Wikipedia so we went to HMV—a Canadian music retailer—so he could purchase a copy. He bought Cosmogramma and I purchased LCD Soundsystem’s London Sessions because I didn’t know any better; because I was still getting my feet wet in electronic music. He leant me his CD which I proceeded to burn it onto my Itunes, hit play, and was met with two gentle beeps and then the feeling of hurdling through a strange and blissful digital cosmos. It was one of the most memorable face-melting experiences in music that I had, and one that still melts my face to this day. A lot of ways of connecting far more deeply with music that I mention just now—pirating, purchasing CDs at your local retailer, burning copies onto Itunes, sharing physical media with others—have gone by way of the dodo bird, replaced by streaming which has enabled us to listen to more music at an invisible cost beyond the one you pay to avoid ads.
Anyhoo, Flying Lotus—real name Steven Ellison—defies easy genre summation. I’ve seen people try using the time-tested electronic catch-all IDM because his breakthrough album Los Angeles was released on Warp, but that seems way off the mark. Glitch does its job, but it’s also way too narrow. As the grand-nephew of Alice Coltrane, his music became increasingly interested in his family tradition—hence the recurring “Auntie’s Harp” motif on Los Angeles and Cosmogramma—and he brought jazz into the fold by working with actual jazz-men like his cousin Ravi Coltrane (son of John), Herbie Hancock and Robert Glasper. He founded the Brainfeeder label in 2008 which would release records of fellow west coast weirdos like Thundercat and Daedelus, and would be home of the most-acclaimed jazz record of the 2010s in Kamasi Washington’s The Epic. He would also be increasingly interest in hip-hop; having interned for Madlib’s Stones Throw label, his music—despite all that glitch and jazz—felt like hyper-digital realizations of J Dilla’s soul and Madlib’s wonk, and when he started producing beats for actual rappers, he proved that you can rap over just about anything.
Here’s the guide to his discography:
If you haven’t backtracked to debut 1983 because you can’t find it on streaming services, don’t fret: there’s little evidence that Flying Lotus would become one of the 21st century’s best auteurs in electronic music here. The beats aren’t densely packed in such a way that just one more sound might throw the whole thing off-balance, and there’s little of the genre/mind-blending that he’ll be known for later on. But that it’s not readily available except on YouTube isn’t because of Flying Lotus’ feelings towards it, “I don’t think it’s a bad record, I just think I could do better. It was the sound of me figuring stuff out and learning,” he said to Vice as he ranked the album last in his discography pre-Flamagra. Rather, it’s been taken down because of payment disputes as Flying Lotus says he hasn’t been paid properly by label Plug Research.
He moved to Warp for Los Angeles. The album is teeming with life, the busy haze of his city turned into glitchy beats that pulse, throb, live and breathe. It’s to Los Angeles what Burial’s early records were for London. Despite loosely playing like a producer’s beat tape full of short beats, it’s easy to differentiate them (which would get harder for his albums starting in 2014 where many of the tracks would be shorter, and there’d be more of them): “Brainfeeder” plays like a cut from Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi, strange and enticing and short and the perfect introduction; a soft female vocal syncs up with the busy drum programming on “Beginners Falafel.” The album peaks in the middle with the low-key funk guitar of “Riot” and then Flying Lotus explores the possibility of ethnic dance music in his sound on the following “GNG BNG.” My favourite track is the closer, where the synths pulse gently like an unhurried molecule. Laura Darlington—Daedelus’ wife—had a soft, modest, and sometimes even seductive voice that Flying Lotus was always careful to construct a sonic universe around, and her appearances on Flying Lotus’ first few albums were usually a highlight despite her limited vocal range and power. This is his second-best album; ultimately—and this is hard for me to admit as someone who really loves Flying Lotus’ rap productions—I think his own solo music got worse when he started tailoring his beats for rappers. By contrast, there’s just enough space on these beats for you to imagine a rapper navigating their way through without having one physically be there to drop a verse.
Cosmogramma goes harder on organic instruments and mixes those up with even more processed synthetic ones than before: the results are his best album ever. It’s way more eclectic than I see people giving it credit for: the delineation of track times is thoroughly unimportant—I’m sure the torrents my friend Brendan found were all fine—because songs bleed into one another while others shift continuously throughout their runtimes. “German Haircut” is a free jazz interlude led by Ravi Coltrane (a good player who unfortunately cannot escape the shadow of his father in his solo career); “Do the Astral Plane” starts with some infectious scatting before slamming into the album’s best throbber; “Table Tennis” starts off as a neo-soul cut over an early industrial instrumental out of ping pong balls bouncing around and then becomes a folk song; “Satelllliiiiiiiteee” begins close to jungle and ends with Thundercat contemplating the rain. Thundercat has a falsetto that’s always nice in short bursts—like on Flying Lotus albums where he sings on one track, but wearying on his own albums—and the melody he sings on “MmmHmm” is one of the album’s most direct, but be sure to check out Vijay Iyer’s jazz take just two years later. Thom Yorke shows up on “…And Then the World Laughs With You” just a year after he worked with Burial and Four Tet, decorating the glitchy beat with a disembodied voice. (Yorke was clearly very interested in electronic acts, but he couldn’t bring that fascination with him back to Radiohead for The King of Limbs or Atoms for Peace where he was working within the “limits” of a rock band.) Uplifting closer “Galaxy in Janaki” samples the equipment from his mother’s hospital room, and the album as a whole was dedicated to her after her passing in 2008.
Where to go after a record like Cosmogramma jammed so much into such little physical space? Naturally, Flying Lotus dialed it down on Until the Quiet Comes, a far lighter, softer, and more introspective album; naturally, the reception was lukewarm. I think it’s a great album but I also think its greatness arrives in waves and often in self-contained songs: there’s no connecting “Sultan’s Request” (Flying Lotus’ take on purple sound?) to “Putty Boy Strut” (exactly what it the title sounds like and I can’t elaborate) to lead single “See Thru to U” even though these songs appear next to one another; on Cosmogramma, they would’ve segued into each other far better. And I also think that the tracks that lend themselves to comparisons with their Cosmogramma tracks don’t make it seem that way: Thundercat-led “DMT Song” isn’t nearly as good as “MmmHmm”; ditto Thom Yorke-sung “Candyman” compared to “…And Then the World Laughs With You.” But many songs find beauty right here on earth whereas Cosmogramma had to search for for that in outer space: “Heave(n)” takes a swing pulse on the cymbals to 1,000x speed and turns the percussion into texture for a boom bap beat; both “Tiny Torture” and “See Thru to U” are pleasurable exercises in rhythm.
In the summer of 2012, a new rapper named Captain Murphy started generating buzz with the Flying Lotus-produced single “Between Friends” released via the Adult Swim Singles series where this new entity held his ground with the prodigious Odd Future rapper Earl Sweatshirt. Some people theorized that Captain Murphy was a new moniker for Tyler, the Creator since their deep voices were similar, and yet, Captain Murphy’s full-length project, Duality, dropped later that year to almost zero fanfare. Notably, Complex, the website dedicated exclusively to rap music, failed to pick it up. And so Flying Lotus revealed Captain Murphy was none other than himself. It’s a fun tape whose novelty of hearing Lotus rap wears off quickly, especially as he basically just imitates Tyler, the Creator verses from that time (“Captain known to choke a blonde out / Does she like it? / No doubt, even though she crying / Oh wow simmer down I only kinda mean it”) or ham-fists his way through lame anime references (“Bow your head and make a wish up on my swollen dragon balls / Catch ‘em all - Pokemon”). “Between Friends”—not just one but two great Earl verses (“Hardly not, gnarly tots, nollie pops…”)—stands tall next to these short tracks which often don’t amount to much. Flow showcase “El Topo” is memorable, as are the rhymes on “The Prisoner” where Ellison pairs up “Starring in” with “Rastafarian,” “Arguing,” “Car I’m in,” “Car-a-men,” “Gar-a-ments,” “Again” and “Cardigan,” but that’s about it. “The Killing Joke” is a snooze-fest that’s relying too much on the Os Mutantes sample; “Hoovercrafts and Cows” is tame for a Flying Lotus instrumental. What he should have done instead was release a producer beat-tape where he linked up with more eclectic rappers while dropping a verse or two as Captain Murphy — one salivates at the thought of Flying Lotus working with Danny Brown and MF DOOM around this time, both of whom were teaming up with electronic producers anyway.
On the one hand, I like Flying Lotus’ turn to jazz fusion on You’re Dead! since it is a natural extension of what he was doing on Cosmogramma, as well as pulling more obviously into hip-hop following his Captain Murphy stint. On the other hand, he doesn’t commit nearly enough to either: great modern jazz critic Nate Chinen considered this album of the 129 essential albums of the new century, and I just can’t help but disagree on the argument that there’s not nearly enough jazz here. Early on, Flying Lotus figured out the problem of writing longer songs by not even bothering to do so, but I think a genre like jazz fusion benefits from having longer songs. Kamasi Washington isn’t allowed to really do his thing on “Theme” and “Cold Dead” while Herbie Hancock is curiously buried underneath Gene Coye’s drum mix on “Tesla.” Maybe if Flying Lotus worked with better musicians than either of them—I don’t think Washington can improvise his way out of a paper bag, and Hancock had sold his soul long ago—then the album would have strengthened the jazz in its fusion which seems to go out the window halfway through anyway. Possibly if “Ready Err Not” bothered to develop anything beyond its percussion tones; it clearly wants to be Hancock’s “Rain Dance.” Kendrick Lamar’s show-stopping verse on “Never Catch Me” is a one-off on this album—and good as it is, I need to make clear that it’s not the best part of the song; it gets bronze to Thundercat’s galaxy-melting solo as well as Flying Lotus’ synthy dance instrumental outro—and the build-up that started on the very first song through to “Never Catch Me”’s series of short climaxes makes the album peak far too early. “Dead Man’s Tetris” that immediately follows is the only other song here to feature a rapper, but that groove has nowhere to go. And there’s a puzzlingly large amount of singing words that feel of great import, including from Flying Lotus himself (or as Captain Murphy), but that never once coalesces into a single good melody (“Coronus, the Terminator,” “The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep,” “Your Potential//The Beyond,” “The Protest”).
Flying Lotus touted Flamagra as a sequel to Cosmogramma which perhaps set it up to fail, not helped by an unprecedented 5-year delay between albums, and that it has far more tracks than ever before, giving it the look and feel of a content dump. And yet, I’ve seen multiple people bemoaning the number of short tracks seemingly oblivious that Flying Lotus made his name on shorter songs in the first place. The album’s highlights are assuredly not “More” or “Black Balloons Reprise” as often-reported, which only shows that a lot of people really like vocals. (Okay, the Denzel Curry track is better than almost everything from TA13OO.) The short songs are often the highlights! Peep the Herbie Hancock-assisted “Pilgrim Side Eye” or the stop-start groove of “All Spies,” which sounds like a vintage video game soundtrack: both are the most maddeningly-catchy and absurd grooves Ellison has cooked up since “Putty Boy Strut.” Sure, there are misfires, more than ever: “Debbie is Depressed” sounds like Flying Lotus trying to make his own version of OutKast’s “Toilet Tisha” but that song wasn’t worth remaking in the first place; “Actually Virtual” is, like everything Shabazz Palaces-related post-2014, not worth anyone’s time. My favourite song is the one narrated by David Lynch, with lots of strange details like the dissonant piano peaking in and the way the voice is multitracked to even some of the words themselves (the fire that “scrambled into Tommy’s awareness”) that culminates in a rap hook—“Fire, fire in the street / Everybody move your feet”—over a dance beat.
Flying Lotus working on a soundtrack makes sense since his studio albums are essentially short instrumental tracks that hang together loosely — which is all he has to do for Yasuke. Not only was Flying Lotus drawn to story of a real-life historical figure of a black samurai in the first place, “I empathize with Yasuke so much — feeling like an outsider all the time, especially in music and in the electronic-music space that I occupy,” he said to Vulture, it also makes sense that someone whose music was backwards-looking (via jazz) and forward-thinking (via electronic and hip-hop) would be drawn to an anime that mixed historical fantasy with sci-fi. But at the same time, it feels like FlyLo-lite; it’s essentially a quarter of the feature roster from last time (including notable fellow anime nerds Thundercat and Denzel Curry), and the instrumental palette is notably less despite the influence of organic-sounding Eastern drums (i.e. “War at the Door,” “Hiding in the Shadows”). The Denzel Curry track is exactly what I was thinking of what I wrote earlier that Flying Lotus’ music was simply better when you could imagine a rapper over it rather than when he was consciously making music for rappers; the beat is basically nondescript, and as for the verse, what I am supposed to do with that outside of this soundtrack’s context?
His EPs in general aren’t important to his legacy for the simple reason that he’s not able to go as deep, but even then, I find it inexcusable that there was literally zero internet buzz for Spirit Box this year, where he tests out far more straight-forward 3-minute pop songs using house as the template. On his first EP, Reset, filler like “Bonus Beat” and underdeveloped tracks like “Vegas Collie” would have added to the “more-ness” on his albums, but stick out like sore thumbs in a shorter format; “Tea Leaf Dancers” does look ahead to Los Angeles’ “Auntie’s Lock.” The L.A. EP series and Pattern+Grid World both feel like collections of loosies that didn’t fit on their parent albums, although be sure to check it out “Kill Your Co-Workers” from the latter where Flying Lotus tries his hand at juke via video game madness. Many of us longed for a proper rapper-producer collaboration and when one finally came, it was a 5-song EP named Flying Objects led by Smoke DZA who was no longer relevant in 2023, and hard to say was ever good in the first place. Literally anyone could have produced “Drug Trade,” which is a shame considering how dense Flying Lotus’ previous rap beats were. The feeling I get from a lot of people is that he’s washed now, which isn’t helped by the fact that he’s been slowing down: it took 5 years between his last two studio albums, and it’s been 5 years since Flamagra. But he defined the modern sound of Los Angeles of the early-2010s by blending jazz, electronic, hip-hop, and neo-soul, and made some of the best music during those years, and for that, I’m still looking forward to everything he does.
1983 - B- Los Angeles - A- Cosmagramma - A+ Until the Quiet Comes - A- Duality - B- You're Dead! - B Flamagra - B Yasuke - B-