Flying Lotus’ Cosmic Collage

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Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
Warp

From its jarring, video-gamey first 10 seconds (which transition into lovely harp music driven by clickity electronic beats and buzzing atmospheric sounds, for a distinct opening track just over a minute long) to the sampled table-tennis game of its penultimate ditty, every moment of this experimental effort from producer and laptop musician Flying Lotus smacks of the weird, the wondrous, and the well-collaged.

Unquestionably psychedelic (FlyLo and friends took over Dublab Studios in Los Angeles on April 20th to produce a tripped-out radio special), the LP is a sprawling, visionary landscape of dreamy strings, cartoonish synthesis, the occasional scissored-up Thom Yorke vocal, and much, much more. It’s quite a tangled thicket, and all the more delightfully ensnarling for it.

FlyLo, who is responsible for a lot of the bumper music during Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, already demonstrated a virtuosic talent for divergent musical tinkering with 1983 and Los Angeles. Cosmogramma, a work of high style and innovation, shows him continuing to push his sound into otherworldly, wildly imaginative territory.

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