If you expected that Flying Lotus’ current live show would reflect the chilled-out, buy downtempo vibes of his 2012 record Until the Quiet Comes, you’d be dead wrong. Steven Ellison, who’s been making jazz-inflected experimental electronica under the Flying Lotus moniker since 2006, shook the Sunday night malaise from a sold-out Paradise crowd with a thunderous and joyful set.
The layered, intricate songs that populate Flying Lotus records feel like they’d be better suited to a solo listening session with a good pair of headphones, rather than blasting from the speakers of a club, but Ellison understands how to shape and streamline his music for live performance. The ambience was kept to a minimum, pumping up the bass levels and emphasizing FlyLo’s more danceable tracks. Setting aside his more pensive material might have disappointed audience members hoping for a laid-back night, but a loud, fun, colorful show was more what Ellison had in mind. He spent most of the evening semi-obscured between two translucent curtains, onto which an ever-changing set of head-expanding psychedelic visuals were projected. Still, his near-constant smile remained visible.
At times, the show was closer to an expertly-curated DJ set than a straightforward performance of FlyLo’s own material. He rarely allowed songs to play out in their entirely, opting for left-field transitions and on-the-fly remixes of other artists instead. Kendrick Lamar, Beastie Boys, Earl Sweatshirt and even Portishead made appearances, among others. One particularly memorable moment segued a pitch-shifted version of Big Sean’s ridiculous verse from Kanye West’s “Mercy” into the infectious Flying Lotus single “Putty Boy Strut.”
In addition to a proper studio album last year, Ellison also released a mixtape as his hip-hop alter ego, Captain Murphy. If you expected him to keep the producer and rapper identities separate on stage, you’d be dead wrong once again. In addition to his own songs as Flying Lotus and the reworked songs of others, Ellison also emerged from behind the curtain from time to time to gleefully rap some Captain Murphy tracks. By the end of the night, no doubts remained as to the astounding range of his talents. He was everything from a maestro of his own lush electronica to a skilled DJ and an impressive rapper. Somehow, he managed to tie it all together into one coherent and exuberantly enjoyable set.
Even the pre-Flying Lotus portion of the show was a cut above typical opening fare. A live DJ greeted the early birds as soon as doors opened, and beat-smith Teebs composed a short but agreeable set of low-key instrumentals as the first opener. Thundercat was on next, with a set that damn near stole the show from its headliner. Much of the crowd appeared just as excited for Stephen Bruner, bassist extraordinaire behind the Thundercat project, as they were for Flying Lotus. Two minutes into his cosmic jazz-fusion set, backed by a top-notch keyboardist and the ferocious percussion of all-star drummer Thomas Pridgen, the audience’s excitement felt totally justified. Bruner wielded an enormous six-string bass and spun out chord progressions, melodies and solos of head-spinning complexity with ease. Don’t be surprised if Thundercat is headlining Paradise-sized venues in the very near future. Anyone who earns mid-song applause for a bass solo as an opening act has to be doing something right.
