The open­ing moments of Cos­mo­gramma are a rapid ascent into the future world of Fly­ing Lotus (Steven Elli­son). Once arrival is com­plete, the lis­tener is instantly enveloped in a busy urban-metropolis of jazzy robots wet with elec­tronic rain and percussion-driven hov­er­craft speed­ing over head. The forty-five min­utes of music that com­prise the album are a seam­less whole. There are sep­a­rate tracks in here, but each is more like a “scene” than entirely dis­parate songs. These scenes are glimpses into Lotus’ thoughts on music and his place in life. As Lotus told music jour­nal­ist Piotr Orlov this year: “You try to unravel the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse in the music.” Although Elli­son is the album’s mae­stro, he is joined on these explo­rations by bassist Stephen “Thun­der­cat” Bruner (Sa-Ra Cre­ative Part­ners) on “Mmmhmm” and the oth­er­worldly voice of Thom Yorke of Radio­head on “..And The World Laughs With You” as the album leaves orbit. When noted BBC1 dee­jay Mary Anne Hobbs said on her Feb­ru­ary 18th Exper­i­men­tal show that Cos­mo­gramma will change the face of music for­ever, she means that the sounds and approach here are com­pletely unique and fresh, build­ing on hip-hop, dub­step, elec­tronic, jazz, funk, but “speak­ing in an entirely new musi­cal lan­guage,” as she puts it.

Lotus’ new musi­cal lan­guage has its foun­da­tion in dense drums that relent­lessly travel through the land­scape like a rat­tling train. Ellison’s per­cus­sion has become more focused on this mag­num opus when com­pared to ear­lier works like 1983 (Plug Research, 2006) and Los Ange­les (Warp Records, 2008), where the drums were some­times too abstract to pro­vide a strong basis for his sam­ple heavy songs. On Cos­mo­gramma, the pro­ducer uses drums in the way that the late J-Dilla used them. They are intri­cately inter­wo­ven with the bass and melodic ele­ments. Pri­mar­ily using sam­ples and syn­the­siz­ers, Fly­ing Lotus dis­tin­guishes him­self from some of his imi­ta­tors with a strong musi­cal back­ground through his great-aunt Alice Coltrane. Amidst the chaos of sound, his free jazz incli­na­tions keep the loose-sounding struc­tures cohesive. 

In the music of 2010, Cos­mo­gramma arrives as a heady amal­ga­ma­tion of dif­fer­ent music that lives up to it’s futur­is­tic sound­ing release year, fold­ing in hip-hop, jazz, dub­step, elec­tronic, rock, and a num­ber of other micro-genres. At the same time, it is strongly con­nected to the his­to­ries of these dif­fer­ent types of music. Per­haps it is this musi­cal time-travelling that helps Elli­son unravel the mys­ter­ies of the universe.