Bleep

Flying Lotus has been a busy, busy man throughout the 2020s, yet his latest release feels like the return that no one saw coming. Through constant streams of music, Ellison has capitalised on seeds sown since childhood, leading with his own vocals on the Twin Peaks inspired Spirit Box in 2024, releasing his debut full length anime score for Yasuke, and directing the Ozzy’s Dungeon segment of V/H/S/99 alongside his sci fi horror film Ash. Music has been at the core of his movements, and with his first release on his own Brainfeeder, he brings all of it together in an impossible concoction where chaos reigns supreme: BIG MAMA, busyness personified.

Big Mama is a dazzlingy high octane portal into Ellison’s eclectic mind, “just explosive, unpredictable energy.” Setting a challenge to forego loops entirely, he fills every second with a life’s worth of influences, folding inspirations from Brainfeeder protégés like Iglooghost and Little Snake among video games, jazz, hip hop, anime, and cartoons (channelling Hanna-Barbera with the cover art’s delightful mayhem). After a hyper psychedelic intro of sharp and slick hip hop inflected two step rhythms, anything goes.

There are richly textured wondrous retro synth arrangements, visceral glitched out stutters, winding zany jazz passages. It’s a blink and you miss it cornucopia of all Flying Lotus is capable of. The subtle beauty of trickling ambience on ‘CAPTAIN KERNEL’ is immediately broken by sizzling FM synth bursts and dextrous bubbling keys setting computer terminals on fire, leading to the kitchen sink of percussive flourishes on ‘ANTELOPE ONIGIRI’ with victory theme chords sounding like the Mario Bros in an acid apocalypse. From zealous rhythms to reverb soaked hallways to complex jazz piano, it’s like FlyLo’s whole discography has been distilled into a wild thirteen minutes, and his humour glues it all together: his maniacal laughter causes a dramatic harpsichord-like synth composition to explode in a rainbow cloud of bass drops and lasers.

The totally out there work that made Flying Lotus so coveted on the LA beat scene is back in full force, packing a dizzying punch with a short yet impactful EP on BIG MAMA.