‘Cosmogramma is a mesmerizing journey that twists and turns with each track, and though Flying Lotus has many great albums under his belt, this one remains my favorite.’
Release date: May 3, 2010 | Warp Records | Facebook | Instagram | Website
It’s become a bit of a no-brainer for artists to mix jazz, hip hop, and electronic music these days, but there were very few precendents set for this sound before Flying Lotus stepped onto the scene. Sure, you had jazz rap and jazz bands informed by electronica, but the mingling of those worlds happened only when a new generation of beat makers around FlyLo emerged, and his 2010 release Cosmogramma is an undeniable highpoint of that timeframe.
Broc Nelson
I have had to unlearn a lot in my life in order to be a better and more open-minded person. One of those things was my hesitation to get into electronic music. I carried a sense of rockism with me for a long time, eschewing anything that wasn’t made with ‘real’ instruments. This was stupid, and more in my head than practiced. In high school I had heard and liked stuff from Fatboy Slim, Moby, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Daft Punk.
For some dipshit reason, I treated these artists as exceptions to what I viewed as a bland and repetitive electronic music landscape. Over the years, however, I began to hear more and more music that could fall under the broad electronic umbrella and began to soften my criticism of the genre. Lately, only about half of the music I listen to even has a guitar in it. One of the many albums that corrected this course was Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus.
Cosmogramma came out shortly after I graduated college and was entrenched in hipster-ass activities. We were poor 20-something alcoholics, but what bonded my friend group together the most was music. When your social network is a bunch of musicians and music nerds, you end up sharing a lot of music with each other and continuously diving into the blogosphere to find the next hot shit.
Cosmogramma was highly lauded, and so I gave it a shot. What I found was something as bold and adventurous as Aphex Twin, but with a fondness for funky bass. Thom Yorke’s presence on “…And The World Laughs With You” added hipster cred to the album, but despite this, I think I was the only person in that friend group who really dug it. The rest of that friend group were busy diving into classic roots rock and floppy-hat, stomp-clap music.
So, Cosmogramma became an album just for me. It’s off-kilter production didn’t lend itself to after bar dance parties, but that made it far more fascinating. This was the first time I heard Thundercat as well. On “Mmmhmm” his yacht-rock funk bass and smooth vocals hypnotize over jazzy hip hop beats. This song is still gorgeous.
The collection of different sounds Flying Lotus employs across the album are mesmerizing. There are G-funk synths mixed strings on “Do The Astral Plane,” 8-bit synth pads over skittering rhythms and laser sounds on “Computer Face/Pire Being,” bop jazz on “German Haircut,” and fucking ping pong balls looped to form the back beat of the heady “Table Tennis” featuring the soft and lovely vocals of Laura Darlington.
Cosmogramma is a mesmerizing journey that twists and turns with each track, and though Flying Lotus has many great albums under his belt, this one remains my favorite. It was my first time hearing Flying Lotus and truly opened my tastes up to the variety and excitement of electronic music. It wouldn’t be until later, after I consumed more heavy metal than is advisably healthy, that I would start diving further into the vastness and niches that exist in this kind of music, but the journey remains rewarding and fascinating. Revisiting Cosmogramma was like catching up with an old friend, and if you haven’t listened to this album, correct that immediately. It may expand your horizons.
Adam P. Terry
In 2010 I was on the internet a lot. I still am but the landscape has changed significantly in the intervening years as has my usage and interaction with it. In 2010 I didn’t have a cell phone if you can believe it. So I was mostly online at a desktop computer. Social media wasn’t quite the same overbearing all pervasive monolith it would become. Facebook had just dealt the final deathblow to Myspace, which was actually where I had been getting a lot of my music from. Despite all its many faults the platform was actually great for direct artist fan interaction and exposure to new bands. I also looked to sputnikmusic, reddit, and various music blogs. But nowhere more so that /mu/ the music board on the infamous 4chan. At the time the music section was mostly firewalled off from the rest of the cesspool. Several key albums were constantly suggested and highly visible.
The thing to keep in mind about 4chan is it is an imageboard, so there was a highly visual component to the music section with album covers and band photos posted ubiquitously. So called mucore, similar to p4kcore or pitchforkcore in reference to albums that has been anointed as uniquely worthwhile by the notoriously snobbish website. Albums like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Merriweather Post Pavillion, and anything by Death Grips. Cosmogramma was one of those albums that I saw posted and referenced pervasively to the point that I had begun to have a relationship with this album before I ever heard it or knew who Flying Lotus was. A visceral connection was made through the artwork alone and the reverent tones others invoked when discussing it.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed at first. Cosmogramma is forty-five minutes of music collage over seventeen tracks mostly around two or three minutes a piece. It is kaleidoscopic, morphing between moods and genres with reckless abandon. Within songs and over the course of the album a swarth of musical ideas are thrown against the wall. Some stick, some slide downward oozing along as they leave their mark, while others zip past momentarily noticeable as they go right out the window.
Writing and recording for Cosmogramma began immediately after FlyLo’s previous album Los Angeles with the passing of his mother. And about a year and a half after the death of his great-aunt Alice Coltrane. Grief was central to the process and the entire project can be seen as a tribute to his mom. But far from having a somber tone to it Cosmogramma is forceful and assertive. Heavy sounds from space lasers to grinding drills and beyond pervade the record. If anything I hear maybe a touch of anger more so than any real trace of sadness. Or maybe what I’m hearing is confidence and projection of strength. Wanting to make a record his mother would be proud of brought forth an urgent excellence.
The fragmented nature of the album makes Cosmogramma endlessly rewarding to revisit. Every single time I listen to this record I hear some new sound or sample I hadn’t picked up on previously. Cosmogramma is an overflowing jungle of bright colors and movements. Joyous wonders spill out constantly and of course you always bring a little of yourself with you to any deep listening experience. These certainly aren’t the same waters I waded in fifteen years ago or even since the last time I gave it a spin. But Cosmogramma has a way of meeting you where you are.
Cosmogramma is bathed in a psychedelic cosmic mood. Which is fitting given the name comes from FlyLo mishearing the phrase ‘cosmic drama’. In one of her discourses Alice Coltrane was speaking on ‘how once this earthly experience is over, we won’t be wearing our costumes anymore, playing parts in this cosmic drama.’ The album’s exploration of death makes sense not as simply mourning or a processing of grief, but as a sense of wonder at the vast eternity of experience through a lens of interconnectivity. Seen in this way Cosmogramma’s wide ranging soundscapes and genre explorations share common threads which bind them together even as they drift apart.
It isn’t all out of this world cosmic drama however. Human sounds permeate the record as well with samples, chanting hymns, the Thom Yorke feature on “…And the World Laughs With You” and the angelic musings of Laura Darlington on “Table Tennis” near the end of the record. For all of the otherworldly focus Cosmogramma is actually a surprisingly vocal record. As much as it looks upward and outward it also stays grounded in the human experience.
Flying Lotus is renowned within the hip hop world for his musical production and bizarre esoteric sample usage. Showcased here perhaps to a greater extent than just about anywhere else. With Afrofuturist maximalism as a solid base Cosmogramma is an atmospheric buffet of soul, jazz, r&b, IDM, and noise. Whatever you take away, just know that your plate will always be full.
