Carte Blanche Flying Lotus
A legendary, unclassifiable musician who borrows equally from futuristic electro, avant-garde hip hop and rap, as well as soul and jazz, Flying Lotus, A.K.A. FlyLo, was born Steven Ellison on October 7, 1983, in Los Angeles. With a great-aunt like the immense Alice Coltrane (whose influence he recognizes), spouse of John Coltrane, one is allowed to wonder if talent is hereditary! At his mother’s home in 2006, he heard the call for production proposals from Adult Swim. He sent a few under the name Flying Lotus, suggested in one of his lucid dreams. As they were selected, his ascension began.
That same year he released his first solo album, 1983, then signed with Warp Records for his album Los Angeles, released in 2008. He will become one of the label's main acts alongside Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher or Prefuse 73.
His music is set in a groovy, dark and visionary mood, that follows a trance inspiration where sounds are born from his daydreams or hallucinations. With Flying Lotus, featurings like production cross genres and generations: names like Kendrick Lamar and Thom Yorke appear as well as Herbie Hancock or Erykah Badu. His albums, all remarkable, achieve both commercial and critical success. In 2010 comes Cosmogramma followed by the hypnotic Until the Quiet Comes in 2012. His concept album You're Dead! (2014) stretches the genre and inspiration mixture further still, mixing electro, jazz, fusion and hip-hop, offering an especially complex construction in a tribal hypnotic atmosphere, perfectly adapted to its subject: death and the afterlife. The song Theme, originator of the You’re Dead! album, was initially titled Jodorowsky, which says as much about his mystical psychedelic influences as his cinematographic tastes. Even more cinephilic, for Flamagra (2019), he recorded Fire Is Coming with David Lynch, while Shinichirō Watanabe directed his music video for More.
After himself composing scores for films (A Portrait of Noomi Rapace) and animated series (Adventure Time, Yasuke), it seemed appropriate Flying Lotus took a shot at directing.
In 2006 he started Brainfeeder, the cinema department of his label. In 2017 he directed Kuso, an acute apocalyptic film, as chaotic as Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, under strong influence of Lynch, Miike and Jodorowsky. Kuso is an extreme organic psychedelic trip, admired by Yann Gonzalez, Bertrand Mandico and Frédéric Temps who rushed to show it at L’Étrange Festival as “one of the rare original cinema propositions to be seen that year”: a “non-Oscarisable” cinema he deemed as striking as Videodrome, Eraserhead or Careful in their time. His second feature film Ash, with Eiza González and Aaron Paul, is actually in post-production.
