Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
(Warp/Inertia)
In case you haven’t been made aware by the tidal wave of buzz, the third proper album by L.A. producer Steve Ellison (a.k.a. Flying Lotus) is something else. At times it feels like a potential game-changer along the lines of Kid A, Endtroducing…, or Since I Left You, and at other times it’s simply a fleeting, brain-tickling experience. But it’s always bursting with invention and ability. Forged in an oddly convergent realm of electronic music and jazz, Cosmogramma traffics in jostling beats, virtuosic guests, and sudden sounds that resemble everything from lasers to bulldozers to dinosaurs. There are recognisable influences in Squarepusher and Prefuse 73 as well as Sun Ra and other jazz, but mostly the prevalent sound here qualifies as “post-everything”.
Take the hungry D&B-deranged beats and robotic whirrs of ‘Pickled!’, anchored by the cartoonish bass squiggles of collaborator Thundercat (a.k.a. Stephen Bruner). The pure shock of it doesn’t dull with repeated listens, but rather drives you to explore its flurry of textures. Bruner’s dizzying bass is all over this record, as are Rebekah Raff’s surreal harp and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s unobtrusive string arrangements. Ravi Coltrane – son of John and Alice Coltrane and Ellison’s own cousin – lends almost ambient bits of tenor sax to ‘German Haircut’ and the drum-intensive ‘Arkestry’, while Thom Yorke sings over a nervous, Kid A-influenced backdrop on what should be the album’s breakout single, ‘…And The World Laughs With You’. Bruner contributes vocals to the spacey, gorgeous ‘MmmHmm’ (for which he has co-writing credit) and ‘Dance Of The Pseudo Nymph’, and Laura Darlington – wife of fellow L.A. producer Daedalus – swoons on the aptly titled ‘Table Tennis’, which seems to sample just that.
There are several other guests, but it never feels like Ellison is simply setting the table for them. Rather, they wander willingly into his trippy world and modestly enhance what he already has in his head. And the album isn’t beholden to all those collaborators: despite its woozy strings and trumpet, the standout ‘Do The Astral Plane’ succeeds because of an entrancing beat and Ellison’s masterful shuffling of so many kaleidoscopic elements. There are 17 tracks here, but most are short enough that the album totals a digestible 45 minutes. And yet Cosmogramma is such an unhinged, channel-surfing trip through mutated genres and exploded whims that it flies by more quickly than one can process it. We can only catch snatches of the whole picture on the first few listens, which leads to many more and the attendant rewards that await.
If any of this has made the album sound overly cerebral or stuffy, that’s not at all the case. It’s loose, fun, and almost goofy, trying anything and everything gingerly and with an undying curiosity. Future classic or not, it’s an album to relish and decipher.
Doug Wallen