Flying Lotus - Pattern + Grid World
- Written by Jim Merrett
The end of year album round-ups are still a couple of months off but already in some minds the contest is over. The words “game changer” have been banded about, as though future archaeologists sifting through sediment could pinpoint the exact dawn of a new age. Hindsight will tell us whether Cosmogramma belongs in the same bracket as the likes of Endtroducing.... and Kid A, but it's worth noting that it took DJ Shadow six years to follow up from his debut opus – and it could be argued his output has sounded hungover ever since. Not even six months on from Flying Lotus' third album and the great-nephew of John Coltrane is back with a side-order of exactly what right now should sound like.
If FlyLo does represent a massive paradigm shift, we should at least be grateful that we're not entirely redundant in this new world, that there are things we recognise and links to the past. Never ignoring his own heritage, he shows us a parallel universe where jazz wasn't just a rapid progression that happened so quickly that most of its key players were burned out, stunting the movement's growth as it was left in the hands of revivalists and curators. This vision instead picks up not where those greats left off but where you imagine the flow of evolution might have got to by tomorrow.
Short and sweet (elapsing in under 20 minutes), it bursts into life with his synth twisted into a klaxon, rotating into a yawn, then a stretch, easing out and drifting into clattering percussion. Key to his sound is that – no matter how much whizz-bang technology and equipment he piles up around himself – he always makes it sing like it's part of nature. Which is why the drum machine beat to 'Kill Your Co-Workers' rattles like rain on a caravan roof. And 'PieFace' buzzes like a flustered wasp under a cup.
I sort of imagine that our own Mr Scruff might be capable of something similar had he played around more with his equipment and less with his clownish drawings. Not that Flying Lotus is devoid of a sense of humour, occasionally slipping in sound clips that could be borrowed from Hanna-Barbera cartoons, or the even R2D2-style bird chirps of 'Time Vampires'.
'Jurassic Notion/M Theory', a title suggesting he's already wrapped his head around the new Stephen Hawking book, is like a hipster version of some tribal display piece you might see in Baraka, while 'Physics For Everyone' is the impossibly catchy finale, a throbbing, chattering whirl of beats and blips that should be taught on the National Curriculum, played like anti-matter hopscotch.
That these tracks are probably off-cuts from his album release earlier this year should tell you the quality of that effort. If instead this is a statement of future intent then we have a lot of keeping up with Steven Ellison ahead of us.