FLYING LOTUS ‘COSMOGRAMMA’!

If Flying Lotus’ ‘Los Angeles’ was an empty somnambulant and zombie-like cityscape filled with the humming of power lines, ‘Cosmogramma’ is the sound of those cables and wires sprung wildly loose and the city rendered with all it’s confused hyper-awareness intact. ‘Cosmogramma’ is all vibrancy and energy, flickering neon shards of city life folding in and around itself.

The big gritty beats are as ever present but they’re wrapped in and around strings, synth-lines and melodies. A more human human emerging from the sub-epidermal depths of ‘Los Angeles’ blood and organs pulse in habitual vocal strands, samples and verses. Bass, guitars, and horns bubbling with Roy Ayers jazz/soul hybridisms. Everybody loves the sunshine. ‘Los Angeles’ suggested introspection, winter and loneliness, a headphone mix on a long walk home, ‘Cosmogramma’ is that city waking warm; a day out spent cruising from neighborhood to neighborhood with the windows rolled down.

Everything on the record demands attention. The details blur and melt not in the darkness and depths of an obliterated haze but in the glare and hot light of day.
It’s a big album filled with multiple moods and attentions; a fever dream informed as much by your own trip as it is it’s own sense of time and place.