The latest sonic foray from Flying Lotus, Until the Silence Comes, finds the preeminent sage of electronic hip-hop coping with a serious split personality. On the one hand, there is an ethereal presence in these songs. On “All In”, the very first cut off the album, harps gently trace vacillating curves. Electronically softened vocal samples from the likes of Thom Yorke and Erykah Badu shyly peer out of the psyched-out beats. Synth lines tentatively wander across entire tracks, like on “Dream to Me”, an entire song built on the synth’s gradual, gentle rise and fall.
But FlyLo places this calm sensibility at odds with drum loops that are both complex and breathless, lending a sense of urgency. Hi-hats, kicks and snares seem to be engaged in some kind of race, only loosely bound by the constraints of time signatures. The synth even morphs into a heavy, dubstep womp on “Sultan’s Request.”
The rest of Until the Quiet Comes is populated by FlyLo’s notoriously vast catalog of curious sampled noises. These sounds, whether from a maraca or a piece of sheet metal being vigorously shaken, are condensed and clipped, sounding rushed and incomplete as if fed through a vast and funky black hole. The coupling of what sounds like a chopped-up bird and Yorke’s ghostly voice on “Electric Candyman,” serves as the most distinctive (and rewarding) of this light-vs.-dark approach.
Keep in mind that Steve Ellison, the man behind the (often literal) mask of Flying Lotus, is one of the leaders of the LA-based “beat music” movement, the protege of the late master J Dilla and the great-nephew of Alice Coltrane, the wife of jazz legend John Coltrane. As in jazz, FlyLo makes busy, conversational songs that flirt with, but thankfully never cross, the threshold of chaos. True to his teacher, though, Ellison contains all of this sound within the familiar drum kit template of roots hip-hop. And it is in this very celebration of contradiction that Ellison has left the landscape of hip-hop production more fertile than it has been in years. (8/10)
