Flying Lotus

Very few musicians this century have straddled so many separate worlds as successfully as Flying Lotus. The project’s mastermind, Steven Ellison, emerged in California from a musical dynasty, his grandmother, Marilyn McLeod, having been a Motown songwriter and the sister of spiritual jazz guru Alice Coltrane. Those strains have forever been key to Flying Lotus, who has indeed sampled “Auntie’s Harp” and used soul and R&B as a musical bedrock. But Ellison is genre-agnostic, fusing the electronics of Autechre to the fables of comic book heroes, the rumble of drum and bass to the elastic rhythms of drum circles. During the last 20 years, Ellison has built a discography of endlessly accessible experimentation, ecstatic with possibilities and wonders.

Flying Lotus’ Warp Records debut, 2008’s Los Angeles, was the first in a successive series of artistic breakthroughs, its boundless senses of sound and play commingling trance and soul, dubstep and cosmic jazz. With appearances by Thom Yorke, Thundercat, and Ravi Coltrane, 2010’s epic Cosmogramma raised the stakes, creating a fluorescent and vivid map where so much of music’s past intersected with possible futures. Ellison composed and produced with the zeal of some great explorer, delighted by what he might find behind the next blown-out beat or corroded texture. He has met a string of tremendous releases—You’re Dead!, Yasuke, Spirit Box—with production for the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Smoke DZA, and Mac Miller, plus imaginative soundtrack work. As Flying Lotus, Ellison is an artist for the 21st century, funneling a wealth of information into a singularly commanding vision.