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DANCING WITH FLYING LOTUS

Flying Lotus, a California-based laptop musician/producer, crafts slightly off-time beats with atmospheric, electronic sounds and a distinct hip-hop feel. On a recent Sunday night in a Shoreditch basement club, he began playing his signature sound on two laptops and a sequencer:

When he came on, a few minutes after the dubstep artist Kode9 finished a heavy, tight DJ set, there was a noticeable shift. Suddenly the crowd didn't know what to do with itself. No one seemed to know how to dance. Most dance music has a clear beat, and gives cues as to when the beat or melody might change. Flying Lotus’ music is more abstract: playful, spacey, sometimes dark, melancholy and unpredictable.

Packed together, shoulder to shoulder, everyone's movements became more chaotic and random in response to FlyLo’s style. People faced in different directions and began dancing in looser ways. The tone and pace of the room changed.

FlyLo (Steven Ellison) clearly enjoys eliciting this response. Over six feet tall, in a dark, striped sweater and a silver chain, he smiled throughout much of his set, and danced more than his audience.

Much has been made of the fact that his great-aunt is Alice Coltrane, a late American jazz musician and wife of John Coltrane. It's easy to make certain connections. Much like the way both John and Alice Coltrane challenged jazz norms and approached their medium in profound, meditative ways, FlyLo hovers slightly above his peers and colleagues. His live set starts at a high energy level and stays there. He makes his albums to be “headphone music”, but his shows are more like parties, like “live, get up shit”, he told XLR8R. His night in Shoreditch lived up to this estimation.

Flying Lotus is on tour in America and Europe this spring and summer.

~ GARY MOSKOWITZ

 Picture Credit: sunny_J (via Flickr)