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[FUTURE JAZZ] Steven Ellison won't settle down. The producer, better known to the world as Flying Lotus, isn't just one of the most innovative musicians putting out material these days. He's an all-encompassing force of nature, blending genres and styles and constantly breaking the boundary of what can, and should, be allowed in electronic music. On new joint You're Dead! (that exclamation point is not a typo), FlyLo has perfected his own spectral take on what I'm going to call "future jazz." The music is danceable but hyperactive, recognizable but otherworldly, foreign yet oddly comforting. Ellison has dabbled in hip-hop before (his rapper alter ego Captain Murphy even makes a few appearances), but never before has he dived in quite like the mind-altering Kendrick Lamar vehicle "Never Catch Me." Led by a smooth piano line and Thundercat's frenetic bassline, the song zigzags through different movements like a fish jumping in and out of water, but Kendrick rides the slippery beat like it's totally natural. While nothing else here quite reaches the same high, there's still enough weirdness—"Moment of Hesitation" sounds like an Alice Coltrane record remixed by robots—to make this the dreamy jazz-prog-IDM hybrid we always know he had in him.
WWeek 2015