eMusic Review 0
Flying Lotus's debut album for Warp came blazing seemingly from out of nowhere in 2008, the same year the Los Angeles musician Steven Ellison launched his Brainfeeder label. Taken together, they announced the arrival of a major new talent, one grounded in hip-hop's most experimental tendencies, but never content to stick to conventional definitions of the form.
That the BBC radio DJ Mary Anne Hobbs was an early supporter of FlyLo is unsurprising, given the way his warped, loping rhythms resemble the extreme syncopations of the U.K.'s dubstep vanguard, her typical purview; Flying Lotus's low-resolution blips and queasy, synthetic tones also mirror the weird shimmer of dubstep outliers like Zomby, Rustie and Kode9. His shuffling, roughly cut drum samples more directly descend from the lurching beats of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, who pioneered an entire school of beatmaking predicated on twisting boom-bap's steady cadence to its breaking point. But FlyLo doesn't just imitate Dilla's unpredictable patterns; his scratchy, digitally abraded samples are cut, looped and layered to create bizarre micro-rhythms. Flying Lotus's sense of motion is his alone; he manages to take stuttering, hiccupping tics and string them into long, graceful gestures. His beats move like scraps of… read more »
