walking upstream…
Flying Lotus
photo: kolby ari · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Flying Lotus
sourcesWikipedia · Wikipedia — Cosmogramma · Clash — Flying Lotus Family Connection (Alice Coltrane, Cosmogramma) · The Quietus — Video Game Loops & Aliens · Denver Westword — Flying Lotus on how J Dilla really did change his life (J Dilla) · The Quietus — Flying Lotus Interviewed, 2008 (J Dilla) · Vice — Until The Awkward Silence Comes (J Dilla, compression) · Bandcamp Daily — Six Essential Flying Lotus Albums (J Dilla and Dr. Dre traces in the catalogue) · Billboard — Flying Lotus on Flamagra (Dr. Dre studio visit, corroboration)
Steven Ellison grew up inside a jazz dynasty he didn't choose: his grandmother wrote Motown hits, his great-aunt was Alice Coltrane, and the family ran the John Coltrane Foundation, where he had his first music job. He came up instead through Los Angeles beat culture, interning at Stones Throw Records around J Dilla and Madlib before releasing 2006's 1983 and founding the Brainfeeder label in 2008. His mother's death in 2009, following his great-aunt's in 2007, pushed his music toward the raw, grief-haunted suites of Cosmogramma (2010) and You're Dead! (2014). He also raps as Captain Murphy and directs films. Flying Lotus fuses hip-hop's chop with jazz's reach and electronic music's texture, treating genre as raw material rather than destination.
the sound in question
2014
Never Catch MeFlying Lotus
walk the tributaries ↓
Alice Coltrane1970s · Spiritual jazz / Jazz / Modal jazz / Devotional music
Ellison is explicit that Alice Coltrane, his great-aunt, never formally taught him music — "she was more my spiritual mentor," he has said, recalling her refusing to let him touch her piano as a kid. What she gave him instead was a sound and a mission: rediscovering her harp-and-strings records as an adult, he set out to protect that vanishing texture. "I wanted to make sure people remembered that sound," he told The Quietus, "the sound of harps, that out-there jazz music." Cosmogramma's very title traces to a talk she gave on the illusory nature of the material world.
listen: upstream & heresource: The FADER — Cover Story ↗
1970
Blue NileAlice Coltrane
2010
Drips//Auntie's HarpFlying Lotus
listen forAlice Coltrane's harp glides in long, rippling arpeggios over hand percussion on "Blue Nile," recorded with Pharoah Sanders in 1970. Forty years later, Ellison folds a recording of that same instrument into "Drips//Auntie's Harp," letting its plucked lines surface between stutters of glitchy drums and low-end throb — the family's harp sound preserved, then run through his own machinery. It's the clearest audible link between his great-aunt's spiritual jazz and his own restless production.
Dr. Dre1990s · West Coast hip-hop / G-funk / Gangsta rap
Before he ever built a beat, teenage Ellison fixated on the production behind Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle — actual musicians playing parts instead of a looped break. "I really love Dr. Dre — he was my biggest influence as a teenager," he told Red Bull Music Academy. "He was this guy who built this whole universe and he was rarely seen... I felt like he was a technically-minded person and I felt similar in that way." Years later, visiting Dre's studio, he found the same restlessness still driving him.
listen: upstream & heresource: Red Bull Music Academy Daily — Flying Lotus ↗
1993
Serial KillaDr. Dre
2010
Pickled!Flying Lotus
listen forDr. Dre built "Serial Killa" from Doggystyle around live-sounding bass and keys rather than a looped break, the kind of "bigger, more expansive concept" Ellison later said opened his eyes to production. Flying Lotus's "Pickled!" answers with its own real players: Thundercat's fusion-inflected bass chasing a breakneck, shuffling drum pattern, the two instruments locked in the conversational interplay Ellison first heard on that Dre record.
J Dilla1990s–2000s · Hip hop / Instrumental hip hop / Neo soul / Jazz rap
Ellison interned at Stones Throw Records just as J Dilla's Donuts was being finished, and got to visit Dilla's house before Dilla died in 2006. He resisted the record at first — "I felt like he was trying to be like Madlib too much," he admitted — until it clicked, and it changed how he built beats. "It definitely got me into using compression more," he told Vice. "He used a lot of compression on that." Dilla, he's said elsewhere, proved a beat could be funky and searching at once, with no rapper needed on top.
listen: upstream & heresource: Red Bull Music Academy Daily — Flying Lotus ↗
2006
Time: The Donut of the HeartJ Dilla
2010
Zodiac ShitFlying Lotus
listen forPlay a Donuts cut like "Time: The Donut of the Heart" against the back half of Flying Lotus's "Zodiac Shit": both squash their drums into a dense, lurching thump that never quite locks to the grid, soul fragments smeared by heavy compression rather than snapped into place. Bandcamp Daily's Max Bell heard "the drunken swing Dilla imparted to a generation" in that same passage — the same compressed stagger Ellison says he picked up from studying Donuts.