Enter the Cosmic Drama: George Reviews Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma
It’s the everlasting gobstopper of ear candy yet it also achieves an incredible level of musical narrative. Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma will send you on a trip.
What Cosmogramma achieves is not easily or often accomplished. The sounds are immediate and explode outwards from the record. One could say Flying Lotus has perfected the art of recording, but to call what Flying Lotus does “recording” is too passive; he’s more of an architect of sound and form. Also, the idea behind a recording is that something was captured onto tape: it implies a source. The sounds are too novel to be such, but still Flying Lotus doesn’t rely on the novelty to capture your attention, the sounds are merely part of the overall idea of the album. It’s an album with a very concrete overall idea– space– which permeates through every aspect of the album: its soundscape and its structure.
Me with my sparkly copy of Cosmogramma outside Chicago's Reckless Records
Regarding the narrative of Cosmogramma, the track “Intro // A Cosmic Drama” is placed four songs into the album, implying a sort of prologue of the first three tracks, which sound like false starts considering their short and choppy nature. Nevertheless these tracks work to the effect of immersing the listener into the universe of Cosmogramma, because let’s face it, Flying Lotus didn’t just make an album, he created a whole new alternate dimension to put it in. The side-chained compression of “Nose Art”, which gives the song its dance floor pulsating feel, is an example of Flying Lotus’ ability as a producer to create otherworldly effects which only add to the total development of the album. FlyLo’s production is not an end in itself but rather an inseparable component of the album’s general aura. If the first three tracks frame the Cosmogramma universe, then the subsequent track, “Intro // A Cosmic Drama”, begins to fill that vacuum and from there forth, the songs just ooze into frame.
A third of the way into Cosmogramma, “Computer Face // Pure Being” hits you in the face. Its fugue-like sonic incline builds until a final collapse and release. Then comes magic– “…And the World Laughs With You”. How appropriate for a cosmic album and quite the “star-studded” collaboration. Thom Yorke’s vocals ask, “I need to know you’re out there/ I need to know you’re listening.” We’re listening, Thom.
At this point, it would be worth mentioning the slightly less prominent but nevertheless ubiquitous (he appears on nearly half the album’s tracks) collaborator, Thundercat, whose basslines move tracks like “Satelllliiiiiitee” and “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph” from sick to uber-fly. These songs are part of the jazz heavy, climactic second half of the album, a standout of which is “Do the Astral Plane” whose percussive drive makes it one of the danciest, grooviest tracks on the album (not to mention I think I hear Buddha laughing on that track).
In the same fashion that the first three tracks introduced the listener to the world of Cosmogramma, the last three tracks return to the album’s namesake mysticism, working off of the previously constructed stellar environment. Cosmogramma is in no way a traditional concept album but rather, it is simply one of the most unifyingly thematically cohesive albums I’ve ever encountered. Forget prosody and don’t even try to atomize; just soak it all in and make way for Flying Lotus, who will likely become the DJ Shadow figure of the 2010′s, at the very least.
Tags: Cosmogramma, Flying Lotus
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