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The great-nephew of Alice Coltrane and a cousin to Ravi, downbeat leftfield / hiphop producer Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) certainly incorporates the odd glance back towards his musical heritage on his debut album, with a significant portion of ‘1983’ distinctly touched by the influences of cosmically-questing abstract jazz and retro soul. Perhaps Ellison’s most obvious contemporary peers though are fellow Californians Ammoncontact and Daedelus (who contributes a remix to the tracklisting here), two similarly eccentric and difficult-to-pigeonhole acts fusing elements of 60s / 70s psychedelic jazz with stripped-back abstract beats and flashes of leftfield electronic experimentation. Emerging amidst considerable hype from label Plug Research and a rush of critical plaudits, ‘1983’ emerges on the heels of Ellison’s recent remix of Mia Doi Todd and his beats for various Adult Swim series and seems certain to establish its maker as a significant force on the instrumental hiphop / beats landscape.
Title track ‘1983’ opens things with a woozy wash of disorienting turntable swiggles and spindowns, the soft squeal of decelerating vinyl coming across almost like the whistle of theremins as wheezing analogue synth bursts buzz and hum beneath the flecks of noise; from there, stripped-back hiphop beats lock in and lead the track on a rickety voyage not disimiliar to Dabrye or Prefuse 73’s angular loping constructions as Casiotone-esque chiming synth chords get pushed through dreamlike layers of delay and pitchbending. It’s certainly an opening gambit likely to go down beautifully with those who enjoyed compatriot Daedelus’ recent ‘Denies The Day’s Demise’ album effort, and from there, ‘Sao Paolo’ offers a gorgeously polyrhythmic beats segue, with just a bare ghost of warm soul organ tones lurking beneath a dry crackling looped rhythmic backing constructed from sampled handclaps and skittering beat programming, a hint of lurking bass hidden at the very edges of the mix certainly alluding to the Brazilian city of the title. ‘Bad Actors’ calls to mind the late great J. Dilla while representing one of the more hiphop-grounded inclusions here, with a delicious Blaxploitation guitar loop smoothly riding over a wheezing bass groove and sudden flourishes of sampled Isaac Hayes-esque soul orchestration (in fact, at just 1.25 in length, it’s teasingly all-too brief), while ‘Orbit Brazil’ ventures out further towards the sorts of cosmicallly-questing beats fashioned by Ammoncontact and his Huvibrational collective, with free-jazz tinged keys wandering against a backdrop of clashing synthetic harmonics, the presence of dry, clicking programmed rhythms placing things somewhere between trance-inducing psychedelia and the linear flow of krautrock.
‘Pet Monster Shotglass’ certainly vies for the best track title award here and also provides one of this album’s most distinctly odd moments, fusing a growling backdrop of Moogy-sounding analogue synth fuzz with haphazardly-placed creaking keyboard swells and melodica-esque tones, the entire thing precariously perched atop a spidery backing of looped sampled tones and skeletal beat programming that starts to resemble a washing machine’s motion with its incessant washing repetition; though it’s certainly intriguing, it perhaps shows less development over its comparatively epic six minutes than most of the other tracks sitting shy of two minutes here manage. By contrast, ‘Unexpected Delight’ sits closer to retro-tinged lounge-soul, with Laura Darlington’s smooth vocals gliding over a woozy downbeat backing that blends flourishes sampled latin percussion with melancholic sounding woodwind arrangements and a constant bell-like ringing tone that continues right throughout and calls to mind a sonar ping, before Daedelus himself makes an appearance right at the end, contributing a reworking of ‘1983’ that manages to pack in extra melodic detail into the original’s wheezing beats and analogue synths, the addition of some extra synth accents and vocoders bringing the Brazilian influences closer to the fore before things unexpectedly accelerate into skittering sped-up house rhythms – as you’d no doubt expect, it’s decidedly odd, but somehow still goes down easily; a statement that could certainly be applied to much of this album.
Coming in at just a smidgen under 34 minutes in total running time, there’s certainly a lot about ‘1983’ that comes across as distinctly low-key, and while it’s not exactly an album that hits you straight over the head with its sheer brilliance from the out, it’s certainly one that reveals increasing new details with each subsequent listen. Perhaps subtlety and meticulous attention to textural detail are the key focuses here; rather than partaking in overt beat acrobatics, Flying Lotus manages to tease new detail out of a comparatively limited palette of elements, by almost imperceptibly reconfiguring new variations on a theme. Fans of the likes of Daedelus, Ammoncontact and Prefuse 73 should definitely seek this one out.
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