About

If musical skill is genetic, Steven Ellison hit the hereditary jackpot. The great-nephew of spiritual jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane, and the grandson of Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod, his career follows in the footsteps of two era-defining talents in the continuum of African-American music. With such ancestry it would be hard to deny the creative impulses so readily encouraged within the family. And so it was in his grandma’s Los Angeles home, where Ellison worked tirelessly to build his own musical legacy; a chaotic and cosmic blend of soul, hiphop, and electronic sound that would bear the unmistakable hallmark of Flying Lotus.

Cosmogramma manages a near perfect blend of Ellison’s many influences – most notably jazz and video game music, which give structure and meaning to the album’s controlled chaos. On tracks such as ‘Pickled!’ furious bass lines rush through the stereo field like characters on an arcade screen, as synthesisers bridge the divide between the digital and the cosmic. More live instrumentation than ever had become part of the producer’s arsenal, which now included strings, bass, saxophone, trumpet, and keys. Brief flourishes of harp decorate tracks, such as “German Haircut” and “Drips//Auntie’s Harp” – a touching salute to the pioneering work of his late elder, to whom the album is overwhelmingly dedicated. Like Coltrane, Ellison had created the illusion of great time and distance within a deceptively small, album-shaped space.

More than any other LP, Cosmogramma confirmed the cinematic ambition of Flying Lotus, which has only grown across his subsequent albums. Having soundtracked cartoons for the Adult Swim Network since 2006, his genre-hopping music has since become a major touchstone for experimental indie film makers and appeared in major sci-fi franchises such as Blade Runner. The producer also offered his own cinematic vision in the form of Kuso, a gross-out body horror that somehow visualises the frankenstein-esque subconscious that underpins his music. There are plenty of words you could use to describe Ellison’s work, but “boring” is rarely one of them. – Classic Album Sundays