1983 by Flying Lotus – 20th Anniversary Reissue ( 3 / 5 )

Must Hear Tracks: “1983” “Unexpected Delight”

Before the lofi hip hop wave, the tommpabeats, Kenny Beats in the cave, Jon with his Octatrack, the army of beat makers on YouTube brandishing an SP-404 and an affinity for wonky, lopsided loops – before them all, back in 2006, there was Flying Lotus.

And before he became Flying Lotus, he was Steven Ellison.

Music is in in his genes; with John and Alice Coltrane as a great aunt and uncle and Marilyn McLeod (his grandmother) writing songs for Motown and making beats with a Roland 606. Growing up around them provided Ellison with a rich creative environment – adding nurture to nature. He experimented with beat making as young as 15 years old, but he initially pursued film. Auntie Alice knew the truth, though, prophetically telling a cab driver that Steven is “a musician, too, he thinks he’s a filmmaker though.”

How right she turned out to be. With the 20th anniversary reissue of his first album, 1983, Flying Lotus takes us back to the start of his 20 year creative journey. This humble introduction reminds us: as a sculptor of sound, FlyLo (as his fans lovingly call him) has been peerless from the start.

Queue up 1983 and press play. Give “1983,” the opening track, a close listen. It starts as an ethereal sound collage, but wait for the beat to drop. Zoom your ears in on the rhythm section – the rubbery bass and snappy percussion. Try to map it out in your head. Every stutter, every slight hiccup, every variation. The interplay.

Better yet, download Reason, Flying Lotus’s first music software. Try to recreate it –all the twitching rhythmic anomalies. You’ll quickly realize that the quantized nature of music production software requires constant creative workarounds to make those beats skip and swing. You’ll also gain a true appreciation for the layers of micro timing meticulously embedded into each beat.

In one of his earliest interviews, Flylo said that he tries to make his albums sonically intriguing enough to qualify as “headphone music” – as opposed to the kinetic danceable energy of his early-career live sets – and 1983 lives up to this goal. It’s 10-course feast for the ears. “1983” is just the appetizer.

“Babble” is an interlude track that blends Metro Boomin’s 808s and Neon Indian’s synth hysteria years before either of them made a name for themselves. “Pet Monster Shotglass” squelches as if through mud, with remarkably visceral percussion that finally settles into a slow motion house groove. The bass in “Hello” bounds from cloud to cloud while the haze of synthesizers thickens and reduces unpredictability like a dreamscape with its own laws of physics.

And for desert: “Unexpected Delight” proves to be exactly that – a final treat to close out the album, and a massive sonic departure. The spastic percussion that dominates most of the tracks is swapped for an airy bongo sample and playful original lyrics by Laura Darlington (a frequent future collaborator). 

The issue with 1983 is that, despite all its masterful sound sculpting, most of the tracks don’t conjure emotions beyond awe and emphatic head nodding. With the exceptions of the title track and the closer, they don’t stick with you.

By 2008’s masterwork, Los Angeles, FlyLo had fully rectified this issue of lasting resonance. Even his 2007 Reset EP has some truly craveable beats – ones that play intrusively during life’s mundane moments. Every journey starts somewhere, though. It its time, 1983 functioned as a preview, but one that didn’t reveal all the highlights of the feature film. It merely introduced the virtuoso who would continue to refine and redefine his style over the next 20 years.

After 1983, the rest is history: concocting the most iconic Adult Swim bumps, engineering the impossibly dense Cosmogramma, collabs with Thom Yorke, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Earl Sweatshirt. A rap alter-ego. Composing ringtones for Apple. Film scores. Film directing. Album after album after album, released mostly unceremoniously.

He’s still at it today, exploring and experimenting as he always has. We now know without a doubt that Steven Ellison’s creativity is an continuous spring. At the very beginning, though, he was just a film student with a laptop and a boundless imagination.