Flying Lotus’ new LP ‘Los Angeles’

‘Los Angeles’ the LP is a landscape of empty streets; a city of broad buzzing highways, somnambulant, restless and eerie. Spread out across four short sides, the lp cracks and snaps with the obliterated sound of analogue space being torn. The beats are the cloistered thump of heartbeats and organs. These are the insular polyrhythms of the body; the molten pulse of an organism lost to it’s own cathartic thumping.

Flying Lotus is the name by which producer Steven Ellison goes and this, Ellison’s second full-length seems destined for more than a couple year-end ‘best of’ lists in a few months time. In many reviews, Ellison is being linked to J. Dilla and the similarities are real, the two do share the taste for a kind of over-saturated compression and a fabric of distorted sonics, but Los Angeles doesn’t share the wistful melancholy of Dilla’s Donuts.

Dilla used a surface of scratches and record pops to conjure the summery nostalgia of Sunday mornings. Everything Dilla did was informed by recollection. His tracks, with their overlapping samples and reconstructed soul cuts were multiple exposures of block-parties past. These were places warmly populated by family and friends. Flying Lotus’ Los Angeles by contrast is a much colder, much emptier space. It is a psychic territory informed not by memory but the presence of dreams and an inner-space characterized by the alienated desolation of a post-industrial urban environment. In this sense, Ellison might owe a debt, not to the roots of hip-hop, but to the electric and reverberated topology of Joy Division producer Martin Hannett’s universe.

Flying Lotus’ also shares a relation to label-mates Broadcast. At times it seems to me that ‘Los Angeles’ is a much more abstract, instrumental and beat-centric ‘Tender Buttons’ and when, in the closing moments, guest Laura Darlington begins to sing, the comparison seem inescapable. But this shouldn’t be overstated for, while Broadcast’s electro-psychedelia coalesces in a kind of deconstructed pop, Flying Lotus’ psychedelic touches resist crystallization. The beats and melodies stray off vaporous into deep pockets of static and noise.

This is a late-night album for headphones and long subway rides, it’s an album of slow revelations, and its impressions are startlingly original.

DOWNLOAD FLYING LOTUS FROM OTHER MUSIC HERE.

VISIT FLYING LOTUS WEBSITE here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 21:26. It is filed under We're Listening To.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.