Steven Ellison keeps it moving. Ever since his first two albums as Flying Lotus — 2006’s 1983 and 2008’s Los Angeles — he’s produced great quantities of mercurial, glancing funk that’s as likely to get your head nodding as it is to snap your neck. Ricocheting around the nexus of hip-hop, jazz and IDM, FlyLo’s elegant machine music has always been too elusive and fusion-y to satisfy genre purists.
But for all of its heady beat science, it carries an evanescent ethereality. Tracks abound with interesting kinetic activity, yet afterward they leave you with only scant recall of what just happened. Indeed, his songs seem to evaporate like Snapchat posts. The paradigmatic example of this might be 2014’s You’re Dead!, which has the feel of a surreal dream soundtrack where vignettes zip by with mercurial (il)logic.
Which brings us to Big Mama, a seven-track Brainfeeder EP that flits by in under 14 minutes. Unlike most FlyLo efforts, Big Mama contains no guest musicians. Smart move, as Ellison has created one of his most concentrated and fascinating releases. “Captain Kernel” tricks you into thinking it’s glistening sunrise ambient before morphing into a facsimile of a mid-’70s George Duke fusion fantasia for candy ravers. Similarly, “Horse Nuke” begins with an eerie space drone, then blasts into frenetic, video-arcade dubstep.
After an intro of piano romanticism, “Brobobasher” generates huge, bulbous kick drums that cohere into a stomping techno jam. The prankster-ish “Pink Dream” flaunts maximalist beats and boisterous synth exhibitionism that would set Rick Wakeman’s cape aflame, and “Antelope Onigiri” is madly psychedelic digital jazz with Music Is Rotted One Note-era Squarepusher in its DNA. Throughout, there’s almost too much excitement packed into Big Mama‘s brief duration.
