Higher ground

Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus always dreamed of taking to the skies as a superhero - with his latest album, Cosmogramma, he's doing just that, as he shoots off in a jazzier direction that is partly inspired by his aunt, Alice Coltrane, he tells JIM CARROLL

WHEN STEVEN Ellison was a kid growing up in California, he wanted to fly. He’d look at the superheroes in his comic books and video games and dream about possessing similar powers.

He still dreams about this. “Let me be the incredible flying man and I’ll be the happiest cat ever,” he chuckles. “I don’t want to be greedy with the superpowers. The other shit will get you in trouble. I don’t want to live forever or be invincible, because I’ll turn into a villain after a while. I just want to fly.”

In some ways, Ellison got his wish. These days he’s best known as Flying Lotus, electronic music’s most out-there space cadet. There may be a glut of producers operating in that fold between electronica and hip-hop, but FlyLo is the only one you really want to get high with. No one else walks the astral walk like he does.

Releases such as 1983, Los Angelesand Resetsaw Ellison set out his stall, but current album Cosmogrammasees him take a very different path. Instead of just retracing his steps and doing what people expected, he put a jazzier, more improvised, cosmic shape on his sound. The results are eerie, dreamy, fuzzy, fizzy and dazzling. Copycats who've made a career from aping Ellison's cast-off beats will be scratching their heads for some time to figure out how to emulate this trip.

FlyLo couldn’t care less. “I really do think that ground has been overworked,” he says of the producers who consider themselves his peers. “There are just so many producers doing that shit now – it’s hard to find anything new. But I’m fine with them doing that because I’m going to keep doing new things, different things, and eventually they’ll catch up.

“They can keep trying to remake my last album and I’ll be on another planet.

“After my last record came out, I started hearing a bunch of stuff that was trying to sound like that record, and it was really frustrating for me. I mean, surely there’s other stuff to explore without doing that? I always want to encourage people to keep it moving, to keep it progressing, to keep experimenting, to stay true to themselves, but there are some who choose to imitate instead. Their call, I suppose. I’m cool with it now.”

What Ellison wants to do instead is make music even he doesn’t expect to hear. “For a long time, I was just interested in impressing my peers, but now, I’m more into impressing myself by seeing what can I do with these ideas I have,” he says. “If I can surprise myself in that process, that’s good. I want to make music I’ve been missing out on all my life, rather than doing the same thing over and over again.

“I want to expand my ideas and make it wider and wilder. I feel I’m finally getting to the point where I can make the kind of records I wanted to make when I was younger. Dreaming and the subconscious have become really important to me in that regard, because it’s a place I can ask questions of myself – it’s where I can go on another quest. When I listen to my music, it puts me in a trance and I lose track of hours and hours of time.”

He was a little unsure at first of jumping into jazzier waters, however.

“As far as jazz goes, I’ve been waiting for the right time and right people to come along before I dive in. I also wanted to feel confident enough in my ideas before I started. It’s a big area, you know, and I wanted to make sure I had the skills I needed. It was a new space musically for me, and because jazz is an ever-changing, ever-growing thing, I wanted to do it right and push it somewhere else.”

It’s not surprising that Ellison took his cues from the cosmic jazz side of the tracks for Cosmogramma. After all, it runs in the family: his aunt was the great Alice Coltrane. Ellison remembers her music playing around the house when he was a kid.

“I always liked it,” he remembers. “At first, I didn’t quite dig some of it, because it seemed strange to me but now that’s the music I’m more into. With Alice’s music and John’s music, I feel that you don’t ever fully grasp it. You understand it and you understand perhaps more and more where they were coming from with it as you study it and you live more. It makes more sense, but I don’t think you ever stop learning about it.

"There's just something about what she was doing, man, that still calls to me today. When I was making this record, I was going through a lot of stuff, and my aunt's music really helped me through some tough times." There's certainly a more spiritual slant to Cosmogrammathan anything Ellison previously worked on, and this too owes a debt to Coltrane. When Ellison was a child, he and his mother (songwriter Marilyn McLeod, who co-wrote The World Is Rated Xfor Marvin Gaye and Love Hangover for Diana Ross) would spend their Sundays at an ashram near Malibu where Coltrane was spiritual director.

“She was our family’s spiritual leader, the wise one we all kind of looked to for guidance,” he says. “The spirituality on these tracks was something I was definitely exploring more of late. I felt like it might be time to start trying to make more spiritual records so they could help somebody who needed help. I’ve been looking at that connection in my life a lot more recently, and I think the music comes from the same place, but the intent is still a little different.

“But a lot of people don’t want to hear about that kind of shit, they just want to hear a beat. So you have a situation where you can either come out with the traditional beats like everyone else is doing or you can come out with something awesome and real like this. And that’s the way I wanted to go so I hope the people will follow.”

• Cosmogrammais out on Warp