electricgecko

Flying Lotus‘ Los Angeles, released in the most beautiful and condensed, the most spiritual year of 2008, remains relevant as ever. When listened to in the comfortable, drawn-out, dreamy summer that is the year of 2024, it exudes gravity and deep-rootedness. This record is timeless. Not in the common way of untethered minimalism, but in an earthy way. It is dark-toned, heavy, warm. It cradles and carries the souls of Jazz and the legacy of its displaced inventors and tinkerers.

The Los Angeles double LP marks time like a monument: Observable from afar, from all directions. With the right kind of eyes, you could have foreseen this record the moment A Love Supreme was first released, and you can still see it from here and now, towering next to Dilla and the fucked up MPCs of 1992. It cut the weirdness and weight of a generation into soft vinyl.

This record is too intelligent to be destroyed by wide appreciation, too entertaining and tapelike to become petrified in any canon. Finally, its cover, forever among the sculptures of modernity, a solution to all questions, one of the great images¹ of the time that was mine.

• Flying Lotus – Los Angeles, 2×LP, Warp, 2008

1. Gestaltet von Build, die mal einer der Horizonte waren, die nie erreicht wurden, zugunsten der Horizonte anderer, erfundener Planeten. ↩