Album Review: Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

At the risk of adding to the already considerable hyperbole trailing Steven Ellison’s latest long-player, it’s probably best just to go ahead and cut to the chase: whatever way you look at it, Cosmogramma is a remarkable achievement. To qualify that statement further: even a casual listener initially put off by its labyrinthine approach to form and function would find it difficult to deny Ellison’s sheer breadth of vision. But to anyone even remotely versed in Flying Lotus’ ever-shifting world it should come as little short of revelatory, a vindication of the conceptual approach he has taken on each of his Warp releases and a timely reminder of his weighty family history. It certainly raises a lighthearted nature versus nurture debate – as the nephew of Alice Coltrane, it seems only right that Flying Lotus should end up exploring similar cosmic modalities.

Even by the release of his last album it was obvious that Ellison’s music was beginning to reach far beyond the confines of the beats scene that nurtured him. “J Dilla plus jazz” it most certainly wasn’t; whilst Los Angeles remained for the most part a hip-hop album, breaks in its humid landscape revealed a far more exploratory sensibility, and its late highlight ‘Testament’ channeled a latent spirituality that shifts further to the fore during Cosmogramma. Both records share a peculiar otherworldly feel, absorbing sensory and emotional information from wispy spirits that drift through the astral plane. In this sense Ellison has less in common with many of his Brainfeeder contemporaries than he does with previous collaborator Burial, whose efforts to unveil the phantoms that haunt London’s recent past resonate at similar frequencies.

The major difference between the two records in is in ambition; Los Angeles’ aims were more prosaic, as he crafted an alternative geography of his home city. Cosmogramma on the other hand reaches higher still, taking as its starting point a map of the universe and musically demonstrating the sheer scale of such a task. Unsurprisingly for such a widescreen vision, initial listens suggest that Cosmogramma is a far more disjointed entity, marked by sudden lurching changes in pace and mood. During its last fifteen minutes or so these seismic movements become more unnerving, often displaying a perversely Lynchian sense of humour – the way ‘German Haircut’s barroom jazz stomp dissolves in a shower of noise before pulling itself back together during ‘Recoiled’ is reminiscent of Inland Empire’s stream-of-consciousness approach to narrative. The same is true of ‘Sateliiiiiiiteee’, its delicate abstractions given extra weight by a supremely filthy vocal turn from Lil Wayne.

But just like Lynch during Inland Empire he shows real tenderness and empathy for his subject matter. In Comogramma’s case, informed by the death of his mother and by his aunt’s nomadic spirituality, Flying Lotus has put together a set of pieces that hold together thematically as well as musically. Manic opener ‘Clock Catcher’ functions as its ‘down the rabbit hole’ moment, and from there until the album’s most straightforward track, the house-inflected ‘Do The Astral Plane’ it’s almost impossible to determine the breaks between tracks. Changes in pace occur almost arbitrarily, only broken by the shattered synthplay of ‘Computer Face/Pure Being’ and the gradual emergence of Thom Yorke’s gentle pleas during ‘…And The World Laughs With You’.

Cosmogramma ultimately maps a journey of discovery, acceptance and finally resolution: similar themes to those informing his uncle’s seminal A Love Supreme record. In this sense jazz is now the primary driver of Flying Lotus’ music – more so even than the electronic hip-hop of his past, which remains unavoidably tied to a certain degree of sequenced rigidity. By introducing live instrumentation and doing impossibly skilled things with a computer, Ellison has managed to craft an album that matches his seventies jazz forebears in its ambition and quest for free exploration. Cosmogramma may lack the immediacy of its predecessor, but with it Flying Lotus has managed to tap into a headspace several levels deeper. The final result offers so much more.