Steven Ellison, better known by his stage name Flying Lotus or Flylo is a American born record producer, beatmaker, DJ, and filmmaker hailing from Los Angeles California. His music is often referred to as “post Dilla”, “post-hip hop”, “post avant-garde jazz”, beat music. However, this is only one interpretation of what a listener may experience when listening to any of Flylo’s four studio albums. The grand nephew of the late jazz pianist Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane it’s no wonder Flylo’s music seems to transcend the musical boundaries normal listeners impose upon organized musical sonorities. The only thing that can be definitively said of Flying Lotus’s music is that it creates a experience for the listener unlike anything of its time. In the words of the man himself “when it comes to film and art and music I loves things….that take me somewhere else I’ve never seen”.
Without a doubt Flying Lotus music creates an oral experience that blends jazz, hip hop, electronics, sound effects, dub, rock, soul, and whatever else into a pseudo psychedelic oral journey. But hearing is not the only way in which audiences can experience Flying Lotus’s imaginative depiction of the world we live in. Drawing inspiration from cinematic icons such as Stanley Kubrick and Shinya Tsukamoto, Flying Lotus has distributed a total of 12 music videos, directed several screenplays, and works closely with visual artists to create visual landscapes for his live performances. Flylo’s music video for his song Zodiac Shit off his fourth studio album Cosmogramma is especially striking visually. The video concept is very easy to make sense of as it simply depicts images of each of the Chinese Zodiac signs in order from 1 to 12 and then backwards from 12 to 1. The cat at the end of the video is staring eerily at the screen because they got left out of the Chinese Zodiac according to the legend as to how the animals were picked. The song itself begins with a string drone underneath a soothing chime like synth sound that seems to float on top of the entire track. About thirteen seconds in a drum like patch begins to build momentum along with some type of low frequency filtered drone which builds to a massive *thud* signalling the beat drop. The listener is then immersed in a groovy glitch pop electronic soundscape of bass and drums with other light sound effects coloring intermittently. Almost like a Warner Brothers Cartoon of Bugs Bunny. The groove seems to be very momentary as it fades back into the initial string drone and chimes from the intro about fifty seconds in.
The album version of is about two minutes and forty five seconds however the music video only covers the first minute thirty two seconds. This is probably because the last minute and 3 seconds of the song act as a transition into the next song ‘Computer Face// Pure Being’ off the album. The last minute and 3 seconds of Zodiac Shit can be described as a electronic groove based outro accompanied by a light string section, acoustic bass, and rhythmic computeresque sounds on top. Although somewhat similar to the first minute and 32 seconds of the song in terms of instrumentation it very much feels like a separate musical idea altogether worthy of its own title. This is very much apart of Flying Lotus’s unique creation process. Often listening to his albums its difficult to tell where a song ends and starts. In my personal listening of the album I see the whole album as one musical journey from start to end. I rarely find myself listening to a single song of Flylo’s rather than the whole album, unless there’s an awesome weird psychedelic video accompanying it!