FLYING LOTUS Vinyl & CDs

Review: Independent New York City rapper Smoke DZA and LA beatmaker Flying Lotus are hip-hop heavyweights in their own right but now they come together for their new EP Flying Objects with a bunch of equally high-profile guests such as Black Thought from The Roots, plus Estelle, Conway The Machine, and more. Together they have cooked up a mind-altering sonic trip featuring spaced-out pads and crunchy beats. The bars are hard and speak of the Black experience and the synths are often otherworldly and celestial as they soften the edges of the lyrics. Another great project from both.

Review: The aural aesthetics of Flying Lotus go hand-in-hand with film scores. There was the original music contributed to the Blade Runner 2049 anime prequel, tunes for Carole & Tuesday, and the small matter of his label Brainfeeder's new film division. Now we have Yasuke, his first full score.

If you're unaware, Yasuke is the Japanese animated series that's been a hit among fans of Far Eastern cartoons since arriving on Netflix. So far so factual, what about the actual tracks themselves? Well, this collection of arrangements is at once very FlyLo, and then not that FlyLo at all. Yes, there's plenty of deep genre diving going on, nodding to freewheeling jazz, prog rock, trap and more. But here it's much more minimalistic than many might be used to - resulting in a thoroughly original approach to soundtracking a samurai story, void of stereotypes, while never fully breaking from tradition.