FLYING LOTUS
Flying Lotus has gone off the grid. Like a warp in the hiphop continuum, his off-world beats shatter preconceptions. Listening to Fly Lo is like crate-digging for vinyl on a distant planet. Dusty, textured rhythms clack beneath strange melodies, like transmissions from the unknown. Sounds float from the speakers in 3D, crackling in the ether with a timeless depth. This is tomorrow’s music. Leading an emerging movement of producers worldwide from his Los Angeles home, Flying Lotus is at the forefront of a brave new sound.
interview by Ryan Gilbert
…You’ve written online about some of your experiences with altered states of consciousness and smoking DMT. How have these experiences affected the way you approach music?
When you see the other side, when you go to the other side, you realize that the music here is wack. [Long pause]. Seriously. That’s the first thing… you can’t compete with the music on the astral plane. The whole experience of astral traveling, or DMT, is that initially people can’t even get over the “awe” factor. You’re hearing things, seeing things that are beyond human comprehension and imagination. I don’t even think that we’re capable of it, I know I’m not anyway. Some of the things that I’ve seen, in natural states, are beyond me. I take that, and I try to share that experience. I’ve been producing a lot more ambient music lately, because it helps me meditate and get into that space. I use it for my own meditation. I get in a trance state for myself, and hopefully I’m able to create that for somebody else.
I feel like it’s difficult to go to that other side, perceive the music in that way, and translate it back here.
Yeah. We’ve been trying to convey the human experience forever, but we’re still learning. So it can never really be honest, because you’re still figuring things out along the way. But it’s the journey into the unknown that makes it fun. We’re changing along the way as we’re presenting this experience. Take documentary filmmaking, for example. It’s always best when the filmmaker comes in with a certain idea of what this is going to be, and then it becomes something beyond him…
