Flying Lotus - A Flying Lotus in the Skies of Los Angeles

Steve Ellison is a man of destiny. He belongs to that category of musicians whose musical path can't be separated from the family background they come from. Steve is the great-great-nephew of Alice Coltrane and her husband John, and is a cousin of musician Ravi Coltrane, as well as a nephew of singer-songwriter Marilyn McLeod (famous for writing "Love Hangover" for Diana Ross). With such excellence running in the family, the call of music proved inevitable from childhood, from the moment young Steve first tried his hand at piano and then saxophone, soon setting both aside to pour himself into very different equipment. The early teenage years of the future flying lotus flew by quickly, spent amid stacks of vinyl listened to at home with his beloved aunt, perhaps also as a way of escaping, even if only a little, the banality of the streets of Winnetka, the well-known San Fernando Valley neighborhood famous for being considered the capital of American porn.

But what would point him toward his true calling arrived during the celebrations for his fifteenth birthday. A cousin gave him a Roland MC-505. That gift would prove to be his first significant encounter with sampling and the search for a hard-hitting beat, combined with an unconditional love for the most refined Los Angeles hip-hop, free jazz, fusion and video games. Soon after came his first real contact with the music industry. It all happened almost by chance. One ordinary day, his mother suggested he respond to a Cartoon Network ad looking for sound themes to place in its Adult Swim shows. Steve didn't hesitate to send in some material, and that was the turning point. The flying lotus thus began his first great journey, made up of 8-bit sounds and sonic scraps worthy of the unforgettable Commodore. This inclination toward beats and sounds tied in some way to the style of old video games would come to define part of his style, making him recognizable and in some respects unique within the vast landscape of West Coast beatmakers. But that's not all. Ellison would end up sampling practically everything. His arsenal makes room for samples from any field whatsoever, and micro-extracts mystified to the very limits of human perception: from Tito Puente to Luciano Perrone, from Curtis Mayfield to José James, from Ray Charles to Nosaj Thing, passing through Lafayette Afro Rock Band, Mike Scott, Broadcast, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Erik Satie and Queen. In short, Steve knows no boundaries and steers clear of any stylistic fencing. What seduces him above all is the model originally created by the much-missed J Dilla. He is the primordial beacon, the supreme guide to look to and learn from for the best of what he'll create himself. At the same time, the man who branded Los Angeles hip-hop forever is treated purely as a starting point, from which to subsequently trace new trajectories, new blends, new ways of conceiving the beat and that thing called black music.

What makes FlyLo (as his fans have come to affectionately call him) utterly one of a kind lies in the depths of a total and all-encompassing production approach, one that draws as much on Coltrane-style free jazz (and it could hardly be otherwise) as on the spirituality of Sun Ra, extending all the way to embrace Squarepusher and the most tangled IDM of the Warp pioneers, Dj Shadow, a certain cinematic lounge sound, and Scott Herren in his Prefuse 73 guise. All of it wrapped in a distinct skill for fragmenting rhythm, making it unstable and alluring at the same time.
Over the years, the flying lotus would captivate a number of notable names, including Erykah Badu and Hyperdub boss Kode 9, who was adamant about having him on "Kryon," the closing track of "Black Sun," the album he made with the much-missed Samuel Gordon, aka Spaceape, but above all Thom Yorke, with whom Steve would collaborate on several occasions, giving rise to a more than intriguing artistic dialogue, alongside his remix of "Reckoner."
Still, if there's one family of musicians Ellison can be linked to without much hesitation, it's precisely the Stones Throw crew, led back then by Chris Manak (Peanut Butter Wolf) and Charles Hicks (Charizma). It's an inevitable comparison, both for the sharp ear for production and for the ability to merge one's own vision of the world and of music with absolutely any other "thing." And it's no coincidence that FlyLo has, over time, remixed musicians essentially far removed from his usual radar (most notably Mia Doi Todd), revealing a clear inclination toward crafting a sound able to steer music that was originally Black into territories that, in some respects, remain still unexplored. It's largely thanks to approaches like this that Los Angeles hip-hop managed to survive the mainstream decline of the early 2000s, suddenly reborn in the most bizarre and disparate stylistic disguises.

But let's go back to where we left off a moment ago, specifically to 2005, when some of our man's compositions were chosen for inclusion in the animated series The Boondocks. In those same years, Ellison founded the duo FLYamSAM with his friend Sam Baker, aka Samiyam, a project that produced the track "Green Tea Power", included in 2007 on the Wonky compilation put out by Rush Hour Recordings. A stint as an intern at the beloved Stones Throw followed. It was the prelude to his debut LP, which arrived in autumn 2006 on Plug Research (Lali Puna, Mia Doi Todd, Milosh) and gave the world its first real glimpse of his potential. The title is self-referential, simply indicating Ellison's year of birth: 1983. What stands out immediately is a pronounced tendency to fuse wildly different elements into a sort of futuristic concept. Take just the opening title track, an IDM affair with a hip-hop gait, or the following "Sao Paulo", far more lounge-like and atmospheric, built as ever from elegant, meticulously detailed rhythmic layering. The gorgeous "Bad Actors" sits instead between Eastern exoticism and sudden breaks straight out of a Seventies film soundtrack. Things continue smoothly with the idea of laying what remains of intelligent dance music over properly hip-hop foundations ("Orbit Brasil"). "Pet Monster Shotglas", by contrast, is the most elusive track of the bunch. At the controls, Steve is a true pinball gone wild. In his personal pinball machine you find a bit of everything: cosmic offal and struck wood. Space and earth. Slightly more intangible is "Hello", which comes before the soft drumming of "Untitled #7", another alien gem that blends chamber electronics with spiritual mantra. Closing things out are "Unexpected Delight", with Laura Darlington on vocals, a sort of lament with a vaguely Middle Eastern flavor, and the dancey version of the title track.

The album would receive plenty of praise from the public, critics and industry insiders alike. Having soon after signed to Warp, almost as if it were the natural course of things, Ellison released the excellent EP Reset, decidedly closer to the celebrated label's sound, as heard on the soft "Tea Leaf Dancers", somewhere between chillout and neo-soul, the deranged broken-beat of "Vegas Collie" complete with a videogame-style coda, or the elephantine ecstasy of "Message Situation" with its sample of the Singers Unlimited's Nature Boy, establishing himself in the eyes of the hip-hop world as one of the most promising minds around.

It's 2008, and the time has come for Ellison to create a dedicated space in which to gather the best talents around. Thus Brainfeeeder was founded, his own label, which would go on to host musicians of the caliber of Ras G, The Gaslamp Killer, Martyn, but above all his friend and mentor Thundercat, with whom FlyLo would forge an extremely strong partnership, granting him deep creative freedom — so much so that the ex-Suicidal Tendencies bassist's frenetic playing would come to play a fundamental role in Ellison's music.
But 2008 is also the year of Los Angeles, his second album, which arrives in the wake of that "Donuts" by his guiding spirit Jay Dee: 17 instrumental tracks averaging about two and a half minutes each, with an immediate feel and a fairly dirty sound. Allison's style, though, is different, unique. It's like listening to music off a worn-out vinyl record playing at the bottom of the sea — rough and at the same time liquid, muffled, deep; a trademark that makes Flying Lotus's sound instantly recognizable. The tracks are a continuous crossing of tendencies, styles and sounds, blending electronics with black-music textures and a wholly personal, unique use of samples and synthesizers. An album that manages to avoid giving the listener precise reference points, instead melting its various souls together, pulling them out of their original contexts and making them part of a new "unicum".
You can find nods to funk tinged with lounge, as well as far more electronic, at times computerized sounds. Then there's the minimal yet extremely effective groove ("Parisian Goldfish"), more percussive, Afro-leaning episodes ("Melt!"), glimpses of techno-delirium ("GNG BNG"), more delicate, stretched-out rhythms ("Beginners Falafel"), all the way to a track like "Testament" (the only one with vocals), which veers toward trip-hop memories. The various elements seem to merge into one another seamlessly. Allison appears to absorb music and give it back to us digested into something new, a window onto the times and onto black music at the turn of the millennium. An album that is itself the product of a decade drawing to a close, one that saw hip-hop mutate into something that, on one hand, harks back to the days of Afrika Bambaataa, and on the other projects it toward a future that is ever closer and ever more its own.

Between 2008 and 2009, three satellite EPs to Los Angeles would be released, titled L.A EP and catalogued as 1X3, 2X3[remixes] and 3X3, containing various remixes and brief new experiments, such as the Eastern-tinged "Rickshaw", the impenetrable "Interference" and the floating ambient digression of "Spin Cycles". Meanwhile, Ellison kept pushing forward with his restless productivity, giving life to a new collaboration via the neo-soul-leaning EP "Whole Wide World/Lit Up/Keep It Moving", produced with his friend Dudley Perkins under his Declaime alias, before the arrival of his third album under his own name alone.
In May 2010, the hugely anticipated Cosmogramma hit record shops worldwide. A terribly multifaceted album in every one of its aspects, drawing energy from an imagination that appears jagged on the surface but always remains firmly anchored to the idioms of jazz and black music. Its appeal is born, grows and dies within harmonic disenchantment and the energetic propulsion of effect-laden sampling. In this third splendid effort, what disarms the listener is good old Steve's will to lay down rhythm by whisking isolated elements together like a madman, often elements with little natural miscibility, but coagulated perfectly into a sort of visionary, alien concept.
And so, the rhythmic instability that opens "Clock Catcher" seems to suggest a mad race against time, while an unsteady, shattered harp sways amid the exquisitely illusory pauses of the clock's hands. The impact's speed grows in the sidereal broken-bass of "Pickled!" and in the pulsing circularity of "Nose Art", a sort of pseudo-analog videogame guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile, the cosmographic illusion takes off in the pairing of "Intro/A Cosmic Drama/" and "Zodiac Shit". Right in the middle of it all, the digital motion of Ellison's own galaxy finds, for a few brief moments, its hypnotic axis of rotation in the graces of a beanie-and-laptop Thom Yorke ("And The World Laughs With You").
But if there's something that truly disorients on albums like Cosmogramma, it's the sheer quantity of ideas squeezed into the bucket and seasoned with the class of someone able to make the soul vibrate armed with nothing more than a plain metronome and just three piano notes, repeated like a heart-rate monitor ("Mmmhmm"). The following year, this very track would earn him an Independent Music Award in the video category, and Ellison himself would be chosen by Battles as co-curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival.
The album's ending is rosier and more subdued. "Recoiled" splits into two moments, set and layered against the syncopated mechanics of a car gearshift, before "Table Tennis", brought to life by Laura Darlington's muted vocals, releases, with all due elegance, electronic liquidity and ping-pong balls alternating with a timidly cosmic acoustic touch.

Cosmogramma and the subsequent (and even more thrilling) EP Pattern+Grid World, released just a few months apart, would once again confirm the sheer elusiveness of the FlyLo brand, rightfully placing him among the pantheon of black music's new pioneers. The latter in particular would help further expand his elusiveness, moving between improbable laptop tinkering ("Clay"), magnetic pulses mixed with drumsticks, and sudden changes of direction staging a sort of unsettling primordial dance ("Jurassic Notion/M Theory").

2011 was the year of the Alt Takes, released amid the general frenzy and growing mania surrounding any new appearance from him, featuring a standout cinematic version of "Computer Face" arranged for the occasion by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
The following year, the single "Between Friends" with Earl Sweatshirt of OFWGKTA, along with "Between Villains" and "Cosplay" under the Captain Murphy alias — once again for the Adult Swim roster — reconfirmed Steve's passion for crafting beats and symphonies suited to a very particular kind of animated setting. A passion that would find yet another outlet the following year with FlyLo's active involvement in the soundtrack of the famous videogame Grand Theft Auto, writing several tracks for it.

In 2012, meanwhile, it would be a masterful short film by Kahlil Joseph that introduced Flying Lotus's fourth album. Slow-motion images. Blackness on the road. Dilla's t-shirt describing an actual philosophy, a kind of religion. Until The Quiet Comes was immediately perceived, in a way, as the "truth" album. The fourth "thing" to decode from the soft-hearted, mind-elsewhere manipulator from L.A. And so, after the alien pirouettes of the preceding Cosmogramma, the flying lotus touches down and is finally home. On the threshold of turning thirty, Steven openly seeks contact with the roots of his own music. His intent is to candidly redirect it. To let it flow. Within this new world of his, made of course of sometimes-imperceptible samples, a sort of funkadelic groove turns slowly — but not too much so.
Having set aside his restlessness, the manipulator resettles his own pulse, gliding over infinitesimal rhythmic beds ("Tiny Tortures"), in an extremely soft layering of micro electronic flickers. The nuances deepen in shadow and backlight depending on the dice thrown, the drums worn thin ("Sthru To U"), in a black, strikingly intoxicating dance. A new harmony reigns. Spirits are relaxed, while imagination chases elusive, intangible trajectories, perceivable only at higher volumes.
It's an unstoppable sonic flow that runs through the album's eighteen fragments, starting sweet but hypnotic on "All In", proceeding through musique-concrète touches and special effects that surface as music-box tinkling ("Until The Colours Come"), acid disturbances ("Sultan's Request"), alien oddities ("Putty Boy Strut") and samples stuck together with quick-setting cement (the title track), finding its purpose in the digital battle of "Corded" and in the amorphous closer "Dream To Me", ready to close the circle amid wisps of smoke and wild trips. Flying Lotus calls Earth, the landing is complete. His return is as natural and affectionate as possible, and the warmest of greetings from his sonic arsenal is a tangled mass of jolts and slashes. All there is left to do is turn up the volume and let yourself be struck, stirred, pierced. Once again. Even more so.

In 2013, somewhat unexpectedly and to everyone's delight, came "Lovers Melt", an excellent mixtape for the much-loved Stones Throw in which Ellison wonderfully curates the best soul and funk music of the Seventies alongside several loves he'd never fully declared until then: from Eddie Hazel to Stevie Wonder, by way of Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, all the way to David Lynch & Peter Ivers, Daevid Allen and Soft Machine. 2014, on the other hand, was the year of a spectacular 3D Show, an incredible tour with the Brainfeeder crew, but above all it was the year of You're Dead!, an album visually curated by manga artist Shintaro Kago, brought in for the occasion to draw nineteen different illustrations, one for each track of FlyLo's fifth LP.
After all, the visual frame also requires particular care, just like the music, which from this new work's very first stirrings once again appears taut and, in certain respects, elusive. The talented L.A. musician lays out new stylistic colors on the table. Reinforcing this particular vision of the world and of things is an incorrigible musicophile kleptomania, bent on outclassing the scene with versatile, unpredictable samples of great instinct, the fruit of an enormous musical background and of the now-familiar, congenital stylistic closeness to his "townsfolk" friends at Stones Throw. Standing out here are extracts from Queen ("Another One Bites The Dust" in "Dead Man's Tetris"), Admiral Tibet, and Ennio Morricone (the famous "Piume di Cristallo" in "Turtles").
Full to the brim with himself and his own artistic potential, on this fifth work Ellison faces a crucial fork in the road. He has to choose whether to keep venting purely his own personal inclinations, or try mixing with the rest of the planet without losing sight of the goal. Steve opts for the latter. Thus come unusual, winning collaborations with Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, with the ever more precious, ever-present friend Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, whose bass appears on practically every track of the album, but above all with the legendary Herbie Hancock, on keys in "Tesla" (written, incidentally, together with Bruner himself) and in "Moment Of Hesitation".
What stands out most compared to previous work is an unrestrained leaning toward fusion music in the broadest sense. The ghosts of Chick Corea pop up here and there ("Tesla" and "Cold Dead"), while the usual jazzy micro-sketches recur in the manner of a peak-form Scott Herren or his friend Gaslamp Killer (not coincidentally among the finest offerings on his own Brainfeeder label), almost as if patching up the album's finest moments, such as the extremely sensual "Siren Song", written and performed by multi-instrumentalist Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors), never as measured and soothing as it is here — just enough to reconcile body and soul — and the following "Turtles", embellished with jingling sounds and exotic-tinged wails.
However, things get complicated when gaps seem to appear that need filling at all costs, as in the album's tail end with its more sterile moments, like "The Boys Who Died In Their Sleep", put together by Ellison himself under his Captain Murphy guise, and the inconclusive vaguely-lounge shadow-play of "Obligatory Cadence". The two aforementioned properly hip-hop tracks deserve a different mention, by contrast. On the first, "Never Me Catch Me", the union between Ellison's rhythmic restlessness and the poetics of a thoroughly inspired Kendrick Lamar strikes just the right balance. The Compton rapper certainly doesn't hold back: "Analyze my demise, I say I'm super anxious/ recognize I deprive this fear and then embrace it", while our man shows off, breaking the rhythm when needed and inserting a piano variation in line with the track's wavering mood. Decidedly more accessible and markedly stylized is the following "Dead Man's Tetris", written by the good Snoop Dogg with the intent of finding a link (?) between death (effectively the album's dominant theme) and the game of Tetris (“I was live when I met you/ now this seems to upset you/ this what the shit gon’ get you: death”), complete with a sample of the legendary little tune associated with it, while Thebe Neruda Kgositsile aka Earl Sweatshirt unofficially drops various bits of nonsense in the background, adding a healthy dose of irreverence to the mix.

All things considered, You're Dead! is an album as carefully crafted as it is unpredictable in its individual segments. That said, it lacks the brilliance glimpsed in the two works that preceded it. In short, the talented, much-lauded FlyLo paid great attention to details and nuances, at times losing sight of instinct and substance. An album that will fill the hearts of his most diehard fans, but one that presents us with a musician who is, on the whole, less freewheeling, and certainly more of a workhorse.

Five years later, Ellison returns to the scene in his own style: a surreal (and admittedly a bit banal) video featuring his majesty David Lynch, four advance singles, nine excellent collaborations (Anderson .Paak, George Clinton, Yukimi Nagano, Ishmael Butler of the duo Shabazz Palaces, Solange, Tierra Whack, Denzel Curry, Toro Y Moi, and the ever-reliable Thundercat) and a grand total of twenty-seven tracks. Flamagra comes into the world preceded, as ever, by fireworks announcing its scale. Once again a grandiloquent, all-encompassing, elusive album, but above all an extremely ambitious one. Over the last five years, the celebrated musical grandson has further expanded his cosmic vision, infusing it with a jazz calling that has by now become the backbone of a style that feeds continuously on the lessons of his Coltrane forebears — FlyLo is the great-nephew of Alice Coltrane and her husband John, and is a cousin of musician Ravi Coltrane, as well as a nephew of singer-songwriter Marilyn McLeod (famous for having written "Love Hangover" for Diana Ross) — alongside the examples set by Madlib, J Dilla, and Edan.

Shaping the soul of the work is an array of suggestions that is, to put it mildly, extremely intricate. A kaleidoscope that is visual too, with a cover depicting a fantastical underground factory set in motion by Ellison's gaze, cast here as a magical carnival barker, generating a burst of fire that shoots up toward the starry sky of an unspecified planet, in turn dividing on the surface the damned souls from the blessed ones, while a small white dove takes flight. The artwork also contains the most varied cosmic references: from the Iris Nebula to the Orion Nebula, by way of the North America Nebula, visible as an emission nebula in the constellation of Cygnus.
The fascination with fire and a blinding cosmogony are thus the undisputed protagonists of the concept. For Steve Ellison, flames essentially hold a dual power: to annihilate and to generate. And so concepts like death and creation take flight. The fall and the rebirth. And it's precisely within this constant duality that the L.A. composer wades about with his usual polyrhythms, followed punctually by jazz effusions and contortions of every kind. A melting pot aiming for a vision that is anything but localized. To grasp its core, one must step back from the individual tracks, trying to contemplate the meaning of what remains, after all, an intimate and surreal sonic puzzle.

The celebrated musical grandson lets loose his own verve right from the opening trio: "Heroes", "Post Requisite" and "Heroes In A Half Shell" are a kind of stellar journey in an electro-jazz flavor. Lending a hand to the liftoff are the strings of Californian multi-instrumentalist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, popping up here and there between a warm beat and a sudden rhythmic acceleration. The first prestigious guest is Anderson .Paak, brought in to give voice to "More" through a series of concise reflections on modern culture's obsession with its own image, while in the background synthesized female choirs and finely calibrated fusion arrangements come to life. There follows a scant two-minute hip-hop beat ("Capillaries") built on piano (we'll find several more along the way), ahead of George Clinton taking center stage on "Burning Down The House", a track that also lists Brandon Coleman and Thundercat as co-writers. And it's no coincidence that it sounds as if it were lifted straight off one of the latter's own albums, given its steady pace and pulsing bass darting in every direction, with Clinton speaking of inner fires that no amount of time will ever be able to put out. Ellison's is, essentially, a mature reckoning with the inevitability of things, with time and its side effects.

A rather different direction is taken instead in the hypnagogic (!) trajectories of "Spontaneous", which draws on the voice of Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon, who proves perfectly at ease. The wild, red-hot percussion of Thundercat's older brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., enters the fray over the five-plus minutes of the instrumental "Takashi", one of the liveliest tracks of the bunch. The elusive tones of "Cosmogramma" return to animate Ellison on the very brief "Pilgrim Side Eye", almost announcing the sudden change of tone of "Yellow Belly", an episode starring young rapper Tierra Whack, who thrashes about between a "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" and provocative lines such as “I’m a firm believer, Bible reader, very eager brain feeder / Heard you need a visa, don’t desert your leaders / Rare like a purple beetle, I’m Teresa, nice to meet ya / Bye Felicia, diarrhea, I’ma die just like Aaliyah / In the sky, I’m so high, everyone looks up to me”, with the rhythm growing increasingly disjointed as it goes.
On "Black Balloons Reprise", the mood shifts once again, moving into a rap blend with cinematic contours.

Contributions by Michele Camerin (“Los Angeles”) and Matteo Meda (“Until The Quiet Comes”)

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