Flying Lotus

With every successive release, beat music thaumaturge Steven Ellison expands his creative universe. He looked inward on 1983 and Los Angeles, ruminating on his birth year and the city in which he found his musical identity as Flying Lotus; looked heavenward on Cosmogramma; gazed into the life of the mind on the feverish Until the Quiet Comes; and mused on the nature of death, the afterlife, and rebirth on the space oddity magnum opus You’re Dead!. Five years separate it from this year’s Flamagra, though in between came his feature-film directorial debut, Kuso, a series of surreal post-apocalyptic visual vignettes. Flamagra largely frees itself of earthly concerns, further vaporizing the lines between jazz, beat music, and Surrealist art. It channels Afrofuturism and fatalism, manipulating maximalism to mete out the murk and confusion of a world’s end. Its through line is eternity, using the image of a flame on a hill as a subtle motif. Live, FlyLo’s oeuvre is paired with trippy visuals, taking the immersively tenebrous sonics into a transcendent extrasensory experience. After all, he doesn’t need anybody—he’s bouncin’ on that astral plane.