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Music

Until The Awkward Silence Comes: A Casual Conversation With Flying Lotus

FlyLo tells us about his new record, his collaborators, and the music that helped him forge his sound.

I started following the LA beat scene because, in the artists that comprise it, I imagined kindred spirits. It all began with Flying Lotus' first album, Los Angeles, a record that first demonstrated to myself and many others that something revolutionary was happening in LA. From afar, at various desks in Philadelphia and New York, I gathered news of the LA scene, sought its sounds, and what I heard echoed into my own past. Here were kids who clearly came up on the same stuff I did--a heady mix of golden age hip-hop and British electronic music, perhaps a few remnants of angsty teenage years filled with old school punk. Add in a sense of humor honed by "The Simpsons" and an early introduction to Fruity Loops, and you get the mind of the modern day 20-something beatsmith.

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Whether or not he is the most representative of that sound, Flying Lotus is its ambassador. With unmatched popularity in his style of music, he's the door to the LA beat scene for anyone who doesn't live within its geographic or conceptual realm. When I finally got the chance to talk to FlyLo a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't help but get selfish and go for all the nerd questions I'd been longing to ask him. At times, I shed my journalist hat completely and just let my fan curiosity guide me, bumbling through my own conjecture and occasionally asking a bit too much (he refused to tell me where he buys records). But upon reading the transcript of our conversation, it felt real to me. This wasn't researched because I already knew what I wanted to find out, and it wasn't ultrasmooth because I'm simply not that cool. This is the conversation that I imagine any beatmaking kid would have with Flying Lotus if he or she had the chance, and to me that's far more entertaining than the boilerplate interview.

First off, I wanted to test a theory that I've been working on for a while: the five albums that most influenced the current beat generation. It can be argued that such simplifying lists are lame and insulting, but just this once I allowed myself this High Fidelity-inspired indulgence.

FIVE ALBUMS

J Dilla - Donuts

Flying Lotus: Yeah, that was a tough one. When I first heard I didn’t like it, to be honest. I just felt like he was trying to be like Madlib too much. I though he was really trying to adapt Madlib’s style too much, sort of like what he was doing before. And it took me a while, you know how it is.

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If you love someone a lot you say 'Wait, a minute, I was expecting this,' and then after a while you’re like 'Wait a second, this is fucking dope, and it’s cool that he’s not doing what he did already.' But at first it felt like that. But also, it was really hectic for me because I worked at Stones Throw, and it was a very important record to the label even before he passed away. It was really big to all of us, because we were all of his biggest fans, so it was a huge, huge thing. So I have a different connection to it. I actually worked on it, I worked on like getting it out to people, I was part of the process of blowing it up, listening parties and stuff, I was there.

Did it change the way you produced?
I mean it definitely got me into using compression more. He used a lot of compression on that.

Note: Later that same day, I met with Daedelus following his performance at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park. I ran the list by him and he mentioned that Quasimoto's The Unseen was ostensibly missing from that list, and that its influence on LA producers was massive. Whether that should be added to the list or replace Donuts is a question for the ages. Either way, Madlib (who made that record under the alias Quasimoto) deserves a lot of credit for shaping the sound.

Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right To Children

I don’t have a great story, but I love Boards of Canada. I didn’t get into it when it was happening, I got into it later on. And I never really had one of their albums that I really really took to. But there was tracks on that I really took to a bit.

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Mr. Oizo - Analog Worms Attack

Oh, big record, big record. Mostly because there were songs on the record that we all heard a million times and I didn’t really know about it until a DJ named Kutmah started playing that shit out in the clubs.

He started playing it out real slow and I was like 'What the hell is this?' You know and it was like Mr. Oizo, playing things by him. And then it was like, I remember the scene, when I started getting on they were playing a lot of things like Danny Breaks. And Analog Worms Attack was straight drum breaks with these wobbly bass lines and stuff—big sounding. So that record was the one that kind of started that whole thing, I think. It really did.

I think that record was the first wobbly-synth record. It was really revolutionary for its time and it’s one of those records that today it still sounds really, really good. It aged really well. I think it maybe a decade old already. A decade old.

Aphex Twin - Richard D. James

Yeah, yeah. I mean Aphex, you’re pulling the warm stuff. I mean, the album was one that at the time I wasn’t really hit by it. It was one of those things that came in from college, but there’s a lot of shit on there that I still listen to all the time like “Girl/Boy Song” and “Milkman.” All those things are like when Aphex made his most successful record I think. It was the one where he sounded almost like pop songs.

I’m not taking away from it at all. Do I find it influential to my stuff? For sure. Especially in the feeling of it. I think people definitely make the association with that stuff because of the label too. It’s funny because I think I found the album Drukqs a little more influential to me.

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing…

Oh, another big one. [Laughs] You're just pulling out all the people who you think I love. Yeah, no that was a really big record, a big deal. That record was big. It came at a couple different points in my life, actually. I liked the record when it came out, but then it was part of that Dark Days documentary, so I listened again when I was in college, something like that, it was like discovering it all over again after years, you know?

Head on over to Creator's Project to read the interview.

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