FLYING LOTUS
Composer-producer Steven Elliot transports his listeners to fantastic worlds, such as the feudal Japan in the series Yasuke. His oversized talent has seduced countless stars, like Kendrick Lamar, Solange Knowles and Erykah Badu.
Legend has it that electro music producer Flying Lotus found his stage name in a dream, which no doubt explains why each of his timeless, unpredictable, otherworldly tracks seems to be the soundtrack to an infinite ascension to heaven or a never-ending descent into hell… Since starting out, in 2006, he has remained faithful to his credo: shaping sound to create experimental and rather mystical tracks, somewhere between metaphysical house, psychedelic jazz and what he defines as “weird hip-hop.” It would take a lot to pierce the mystery of Steven Ellison, as he was born, the Californian-bred genius who has worked with rapper Kendrick Lamar, the queen of nu-soul Erykah Badu, Solange Knowles and the hyper-talented bassist Thundercat. Another legend says that after an entirely improvised nocturnal session, without knowing it Flying Lotus caused a mesmerized Thom Yorke to radically modify his working method. But from the get-go he is categoric: “No point asking me about my influences, I wouldn’t know what to tell you…”
In his electro extravaganzas, where the offbeat rules, minimalist melodies are fired out as though from a laser gun. Universally hailed by the music press, his six studio albums condense the strange dreams of David Lynch, the miraculous visions of Salvador Dalí and the psyche of an LSD user. Yet the 37-year-old appears admirably sober when playing his machines and instruments. “Drugs don’t give me better ideas. Cannabis just puts my brain into pause mode, because it overheats the rest of the time. Getting high would only exacerbate my tendency to procrastinate… But I’ve always needed to escape myself to find inspiration. Sometimes that happens through painting, and in particular Surrealism. I hate reality – the world is horrible enough.”
This year Flying Lotus composed the soundtrack to the Netflix cartoon series Yasuke, which was directed by the African-American producer and cartoonist LeSean Thomas in partnership with the Japanese animation studio MAPPA. Set in a feudal Japan torn apart by war, the series follows the ronin
Yasuke – an outlaw fighter whose blade defends none but his own ideals – as he battles to maintain a peaceful existence after a lifetime ruled by sweat, tears and bloodshed. Inspired by the true story of Yasuke, an African mercenary who served the legendary Oda Nobunaga in the Sengoku period, the series glorifies the first black samurai. “When I saw the opening scene, I was gobsmacked,” recalls Flying Lotus. “A giant pitched battle for which I had to come up with a musical theme whose rhythm would correspond to each blow struck by the fighters. I had no idea where to start. It was the first time I’d composed the soundtrack to a war. I soon realized it was actually much easier for me to make progress without the images. I understood the spirit behind the series: a samurai soundtrack influenced by hip-hop.”
All of Ellison’s DNA can be found in his Yasuke themes: Thundercat’s
falsetto, the spare strings of a Hans Zimmer, a few borrowings from jazzrap and, above all, the genius of Jean-Jacques Perrey, a pioneer – and oddball – of electro music who, in the 1960s, championed the Ondioline, an ancestor of the analogue synthesizer that was much used in science-fiction soundtracks. If Ellison rises to the challenge with brio – 26 tracks for an album of 43 minutes – it’s no doubt because this was not his first attempt at such an exercise: a long-time fan of Japanese culture, he had already composed the soundtrack to Shin’ichiro Watanabe’s short film Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (2017).
Great-nephew of the jazz pianist Alice Coltrane, wife of saxophonist John Coltrane, Ellison surrendered very young to the siren calls of both music and his Nintendo console. Animated cartoons and video games would stay with him throughout his career: he started out composing the theme music to cartoons for the Adult Swim channel; seven years later, the American videogame producer Rockstar called on him to invent his own fictive radio station for the fifth episode of its ultra-violent open-world series Grand Theft Auto, which includes several in-game music radio stations.
In 2007 and 2008, Ellison lost first his aunt and then his mother. His 2010 album Cosmogramma – a pun on “cosmic drama” – helped him through this difficult period. “To achieve things, you have to be able to go beyond your sorrow. Today I can compose terribly sad tracks and yet be perfectly happy.” On the album, he transformed the sorrow by recording the buzzing medical equipment in his mother’s hospital room, using it as samples in Galaxy in Janaki, the final track on Cosmogramma. But, for some, his masterpiece is Flamagra (2019), a more accessible chapter in his work: inspired by the world of David Lynch, Elliot lined up the stars for a volcanic ride through his personal dreams. The artwork for Flamagra features inexpressive eyes set into cogs, flames licking at enormous rusty tubes, fantastic mushrooms over which butterflies flit, and purple mountains rising proudly into an indigo sky peppered with stars – the improbable, hallucinatory mandala of an intergalactic acid-dropping hip-hop voyager.
“I’m not scared of ageing,” Elliot says today. “I’m scared of failure, like everyone. Scared of having done it all for nothing, that no one will give a damn.” The last time he cried was earlier this year, on the shoulder of his friend Thundercat, when the bassist won the Grammy Award for best R’n’B album with It Is What It Is – an album Ellison co-produced. “I’m never really satisfied with any of my tracks. I only feel at peace when I see the work available on the streaming platforms, because then I know there’s no going back. Those tears I shed at the Grammy Awards represented years of hard labour, as though the trophy proved that someone had indeed listened to our music and understood all our sacrifices.”