FLYING LOTUS - Big Mama

After trying his hand as a composer of soundtracks for films like "Yasuke" and "Ash", Los Angeles's most elusive flying lotus has finally gone back to making music solely and exclusively for himself. "Big Mama", while not an LP, says a lot about the path Steve Ellison has taken, but above all about how electrifying and explosive his immediate future could be.

“I wanted it to feel like being shot out of a cannon, an explosive and unpredictable energy” — these are the very first words the Californian musician used to describe the seven movements of an operetta that makes organized schizophrenia its motto, as Flying Lotus himself explains further to reinforce the idea behind it all: “Like a fucking computer gone haywire. Like a machine that's lost its mind; an explosion of experimental, maximalist, hyper-fast electronic energy”.

In "Big Mama" every bar is unique and contains no loops. At times, in fact, it feels like listening to a hyper-expanded variant of the accelerationist ideas found on Lorenzo Senni's "Superimpositions". It's as if Ellison had decided to project his music inside a videogame that was never made ("Captain Kernel"), imagining, time after time, actions and workarounds to make it all the way through the game's storyline. In its shorter passages, this tendency yields sketches of pure progressive electronic mixed with IDM-style arrangements scattered about in the manner of vintage Squarepusher, between one change of direction and the next ("Brobobasher"). Just take a look at the cover art for an even fuller picture of the matter.

Flying Lotus is having fun. A lot of fun, too. Between one mad shift and a sudden pause for reflection, Ellison plays with the lines of his keyboards with the same wonder as a child in front of a Commodore 64 back in the 80s. The continuous mix of all the tracks placed at the end finally invites a single, unbroken listen to an EP that is much more than a mere suggestion and therefore cannot be dismissed as an elaborate release meant simply to warm up the engines. Given such excellent premises, then, the wait for the new LP becomes almost unbearable once again.

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15/04/2026