Carnegie Hall

Some say that guitar genius Jimi Hendrix had synesthesia, an ability to see color in sound. If true, Hendrix clearly replicated this experience for his fans on their musical sojourn through rock utopia. Flying Lotus’s sonic wonders evoke a different nature of spacy color palettes than Hendrix, one that benefits from a digitized age of layered samples that Hendrix was yet to see but clearly innovated. Jimi’s new world uncovered new realms through distortion and pitch. Blues was Jimi’s Earth whereas Jimi is Earth to the also otherworldy Flying Lotus.

Flying Lotus, born Steven Ellison, evolved in a land where Hendrix was both a deity of the past and an aspirational master in the dreamy future. However, FlyLo’s familial relations to jazz legend Alice Coltrane percolate in his sound and texture. With the remix of time, a new now is born. Behold, a post-modern albeit future Earth where the deconstruction of sound or the very nature of digital “machine” technology as musical instrument is normalized.

Flying Lotus’s tonal brush crafts new galaxies with a hint of our root chakra’d home planet sprinkled throughout. Not one to shy from warm tones, harps, or jazz drums, FlyLo’s digital innovations more often than not land on the crossroads of free jazz and ’90s hip-hop production (Atlanta’s Organized Noize comes to mind), all recreated by someone who likely grew up fascinated by the sonic intensity of video games.

His musicscapes are testaments to electronic music’s capacity to transcend genre and serve as a tapestry of cultural memory. His albums have the high arc of a film score (even when they are not a film score or soundtrack, as it was with Yasuke). Sometimes his music resonates as your walking score to the liminal now, an Afrosurreal lived experience jettisoning into an Afrofuture as evidenced in the LP Flamagra.

Other times, his music registers as the future world itself, as in the album Cosmogramma, a musictopia charged to never forget its textured funk jazzy musical roots forever integrated into the digital DNA.

The LA Beat scene’s reigning constellation, FlyLo demonstrates the apex of electronic music mastery for the era, forever obliterating the socialization of gentrifying Black music creations. On planet Flying Lotus, acid jazz can be a stone’s throw away from Chicago juke which can run cater-corner to Fela-era Afrobeat.

A producer with incredible range, FlyLo can spot the symmetry in these music-born philosophies and give birth to one all his own. He makes the differing music realities invoked by jazz drummer Max Roach and footwork’s DJ Rashad feel like seamless realms of floating utopias. Yet, FlyLo’s ability to re-craft worlds and obliterate boundaries is one innate to Afrofuturist practitioners. The history of Black innovators and masters in the realm of electronic music creation is one in which the Sankofa tenants of bringing the best of the past forward is a remixed futures modality. The term Blacktronica was first used as the name for a series of events that featured Black electronic music artists in London—a term created by event host Charlie Dark in 1998. Today it is a term championed by Carnegie Hall festival co-curator King James Britt (who also teaches a course of the same name) to describe the plethora of electronic music styles from artists of the African continent and diaspora. Flying Lotus is among the proven luminaries of this school of futures music. We stay in awe and forever humbled by his wondrous world of digitized aural color.

Ytasha L. Womack—a member of Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism Curatorial Council—is an independent scholar, filmmaker, dancer, and author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Her other books include Rayla 2212 and Rayla 2213; Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity; Beats, Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop; and the upcoming Blak Kube. She directed the Afrofuturist dance film A Love Letter to the Ancestors from Chicago and is an artist-in-residence with Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal.

Photography: Flying Lotus by Tim Saccenti.