Flying Lotus

He’s loved by diverse talents from Thom Yorke to Erykah Badu; he’s the toast of LA’s bass culture scene; and he has deep jazz links (via family ties to the late great Alice Coltrane and her sax- slinging son Ravi): Steven Ellis, aka Flying Lotus, is just about the coolest producer on the planet right now.

Yet 2010’s space opera album Cosmogramma boldly went into the psychedelic unknown, meshing the scatterbrain electronica of LA’s Low End Theory club to cousin Alice’s astral projections and symphonic soul. Picking up critical plaudits, a Gilles Peterson Worldwide Award for Album of the Year and rave audience reactions to his astonishing Mahavishnu-style live show, Fly Lo has brought wildly imaginative music back to the mainstream.

Unusually for a hip hop-centric artist, you’ve been exploring jazz – how has that affected you as a creative person?  
I wish I was a better musician in that respect, because that’s the most inspiring part of touring now, but it’s the part that I can’t do. It’s like I can make electronic music all day but I’d much rather be playing an instrument with Thundercat on stage or whatever, and that’s the next stage in the process, that and doing more vocals on my end. I feel like more than ever I need to start speaking and saying things on songs rather than letting them just be instrumentals. Again, there’s so much to say, and obviously the music speaks for itself, but I feel like I can define the experience a little bit more with words.

Has your friendship with Thom Yorke had an influence on how you make music now?  
Absolutely, it’s like one of those things where I know he’s listening and we know we want to continue our collaboration. I try to keep that in mind when I’m working on stuff too, thinking whether this is something he can get into as well. Obviously, I’ve always been into Radiohead.

He seems very open – he was getting really into the stuff you two were doing at Low End Theory – yet this is a very white guy from Oxfordshire...
[Laughs] Hanging out in some grimy-ass club in LA! He’s great... I’m sure some people were concerned for his safety that night but he wasn’t worried at all, he was like “Shiiit...”

Do you find music fans more open- minded today – and able to accept a wider range of music based simply on it being good as opposed to slickly packaged?  
Yeah, I do find them more open-minded, but at the same time I feel that a lot of the mystique of creating music has gone. I mean, we’re in a time where it’s hard to be a guy like Burial where you can hide behind images and cartoons and not have to engage with the fans. Maybe a better man will be able to figure out a way to do it, but a lot of the social networking and the better access we have to artists on a personal level kind of removes some of the magic, I think. Think about it: what if in the early ’90s Michael Jackson had used Twitter? It just wouldn’t work for him.

Part of the magic of the Michael Jackson thing was his being unavailable, that made it work. You have to hold to some element of surprise, some element of magic and mystique – especially for a new artist. It’s so difficult for them to put themselves out there without getting involved in that whole thing – you’ve got to put your name and your face out there for people to check you out. Unless you come up with some sort of awesome mysterious project that gets everyone interested. But even if you did that people look at that kind of shit nowadays and just think, “Oh there’s some guy just trying to be mysterious...” or they are just like, “Who cares?” I mean, my favourite artists write me back! [Laughs] So there are pros and cons to it.

You’ve done a lot to revolutionise how jazz is perceived as well, because jazz used to be the most radical and rebellious form of music making, and sadly a lot of it can now sound very safe and predictable. 
If you’re playing songs from 20 or 30 years ago and don’t make it progressive or try to change it up at all, it’s like, “How good can we play a 35-year-old song?” That shit kills me man! It kills me, and so with my label [Brainfeeder] I’ve been trying to open that door for other musicians, like jazz musicians, to try to think outside and invite some of the technology into the music too. You know I always thought that if some of these dope-ass jazz musicians, some of these really amazing players were fucking [music software] Ableton masters too, that would fuck the whole game up, man! It’s this kind of in-between place at the moment, but I’ve foreseen it, man. Pretty soon you’re going to have these virtuoso musicians really getting in with the technology too and really accelerating the music.

Flying Lotus plays the Metro on Friday with Martyn and Africa Hitech