Description

1XLP Vinyl –  WARPLP334

Midnight movies and anime have long played a crucial role in Flying Lotus’ aesthetic universe. Now, between the recently established film division of his Brainfeeder label, numerous scoring projects, and his foray into directing with the animated feature Kuso, the artist born Steven Ellison is increasingly making his mark on film as well as music. It’s a natural development for an artist who cites the influence of Shinya Tsukamoto’s grimy cyberpunk body-horror nightmare Tetsuo: The Iron Man as often as he does any given musician. The man did get his start composing Adult Swim bumpers, after all.

He makes his full-length anime scoring debut with Yasuke, a new Netflix series, animated by Japan’s MAPPA studio, that spins a wild cosmic yarn from the mysterious historical case of a real-life Black samurai during the much-romanticized shogunate era. Though the protagonist is based on an actual figure from the 16th century, the show is not limited to a medieval milieu: The action is charged with superpowered mecha, sojourns through time, trippy battle sequences, and sinister Catholic priests. Credit Yasuke creator LeSean Thomas, who made an early name for himself at Adult Swim—just like Flying Lotus—with these innovations before relocating to South Korea and eventually Japan. Thomas is much like the hero of his show: a self-starting, singularly driven individual who has carved out a new space for himself in a country and industry he is not native to.

Ellison is rendered as a samurai on the cover of the Yasuke soundtrack, though his sunglasses are as much Blade as medieval knight. It’s hard not to take that image as a metaphor: Like a samurai, Ellison is constantly testing himself and honing his skills. In a recent interview, he describes his emotional connection to the story of Yasuke, both as someone who has felt like an outsider in various worlds—a hip-hop producer and electronic DJ branching out into jazz, a musician making movies, a fan of David Lynch working with David Lynch—and more specifically because of his own experiences in Japan as a Black man. An intense and prolific collaborator, Ellison is far from being a lone ronin, but his style remains his own. His first few records as Flying Lotus are firmly part of the Los Angeles beat scene: a swirl of psychedelic drum patterns, fusion jazz bass lines, and the chirps and clicks of video game soundtracks. Soon, he’d flesh out that base pattern into something even more cosmic and expansive—truly maximalist works inspired by progressive rock and spiritual jazz. Yasuke strips down many of those familiar references and molds them into a more minimalist form. Though tracks like “Your Lord” incorporate sparse strings, flutes, and wooden percussion meant to evoke East Asian musical traditions, Ellison is careful to avoid falling prey to the tropes common to Western stereotypes of Japanese music.