For 26-year-old
Steve Ellison's deservedly hyped third album,
Flying Lotus loosened the reins and set out to make
Cosmogramma, which his label,
Warp, promoted as a space opera of sorts. More of a long-playing, cohesive listen than the prior year's excellent
Los Angeles, which felt like a collection of insular,
Dilla-inspired beats,
Flying Lotus evolved into a forerunner of his own personal genre. On this, his most far-out release to date, he incorporates a thicker amount of live instrumentation (horns, strings, bass, guitar, and even harp) with his laptop manipulations, and branches away from hip-hop. Call it futuristic fusion, if you will, but the result is much more ahead of the curve than, say,
Herbie Hancock's
Future 2 Future (though it shares some similarities) and more on par with a
Jaga Jazzist or a
Four Tet release. That is, it's left of center.
Free jazz plays a huge part, and
Flylo draws deeply from his
Coltrane lineage, but he also dips into past-prime electronic and dance styles.
Techno,
house, and
drum'n'bass all take shape alongside
IDM blips,
dubstep, and
disco strings or
blaxploitation soundtrack orchestration, courtesy of
OutKast and
Erykah Badu arranger
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. As a mass of shape-shifting layers, the album mutates constantly throughout the tracks, in a dense soundscape that sometimes feels palpable and at other times becomes liquid, rife with bottomless possibilities.
Cosmogramma is an instrumental genre-jumping journey for head-bopping intellectuals, and the meditative melodies by vocalists
Thundercat,
Laura Darlington, and
Thom Yorke only add to the experience. ~ Jason Lymangrover
![Pretty Hate Machine [2010 Remaster]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0602527567730_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg "Pretty Hate Machine [2010 Remaster]")
![The Complete BBC Sessions [Super Deluxe]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0081227943882_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "The Complete BBC Sessions [Super Deluxe]")
![The BQE [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0656605627823_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "The BQE [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]")
