This weekend, I had the pleasure of going to the Hollywood
Bowl for a show headlined by one of my absolute favorite bands Animal
Collective. But while their show was amazing, it’s not the indie-psych-rock
outfit that’s the inspiration for this post. Instead, this post is about Flying
Lotus, who opened the show and, according to pretty much everyone in attendance,
proceeded to steal the show from the veteran headliners.
Steve Ellison, also known as Flying Lotus, is a Los Angeles
native, multi-genre producer, and arguably the leader of the Beats movement. Great-nephew
of jazz pianist Alice Coltrane (who was married to jazz legend John Coltrane),
Flylo, as he is known by fans, first gained popularity as the producer of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim “bumps” – the 10-15 second beats they would play in their pre-show
interludes. But his mark was truly made on the independent music scene with his
2010 album Cosmogramma. The album
received unanimous critical acclaim, with music blog sputnikmusic.com
predicting Flying Lotus to be “the next big visionary” of electronic music and
PopMatters comparing him to rock kings Radiohead saying, “Flying Lotus, much like Yorke,
Greenwood & Co., has made a definitive summary of a decade's worth of
advances in electronic music, a release that transcends genre and deserves to
become a glorified phenomena by those who experience it.”
The album transcended genre because it was unlike anything
before it – it combined elements of jazz, funk, hip-hop, techno, and even rock.
But beneath all of these influences was one common thread – the beats. Take a
song like Nose Art (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqNFkQmmbcQ)
– it begins as an orchestral dream with drums layered on top, until the 26
second mark, where he throws in a vocal sample saying “we’ll talk about a place
with our beat…but no one believes it exists.” And then the beat drops, a
dramatic bass line that owns the other elements of the song. And at 1:01, for a
mere three seconds, Flylo reveals that bass upon which his song is centered, cutting
all audio tracks except the sound of oscillating electronic bass. Listen to
this whole album and I can guarantee you’ll agree – you've never heard anything
like this before.
But before all of the hype and popularity that his
groundbreaking album brought him, Flying Lotus was in an exclusive group of
producers who founded Low End Theory, a weekly Beats club in Lincoln Heights. In
its six year lifespan, Low End Theory has become somewhat of a Los Angeles
institution. The show is still held in The Airliner, its original tiny home
(the indoor stage/music area only holds about 150 people, while the back patio holds many more), is
still age 18+, and still costs a mere ten dollars, with no advanced tickets
ever sold. But unlike the club’s early days, the line to enter now forms an
hour before the doors open and wraps around the block by the time they do - it
can take multiple hours to get in. What are people waiting for? Well, each week three or four guest DJs are announced and appear, with additional sets from
Flylo’s co-founders like The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer (I swear that’s
what he calls himself) and DJ Nobody. I have been to Low End over ten times but
had only heard of the performers before going two or three times - whether you
have heard of them or not, every single week amazing underground DJs from all
over the world show up and throw down unbelievable sets. And the crowd, made up
of locals between 18 and 30, who have waited in a painful line to get in, goes
nuts, always willing to dance their asses off. But in addition to these weekly announced
guest, Low End Theory attracts unannounced special guest appearances from the
likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (who is featured on Flying Lotus albums) and UK soul-bass protégé James Blake. And since Flying
Lotus’ explosion in hype and popularity, he can now only play his own show as a secret guest, lest the
line be around the block by 8pm...
_
To hear the rest of the story and find out what happened at the Hollywood Bowl, check back for part 2 of this post later this week!
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