Flying Lotus
Spirit Box
WARP
The lineage of intergalactic Afrofuturist music-makers that starts with Sun Ra and George Russell and has since welcomed Lee “Scratch” Perry, Nona Hendryx, George Clinton, Ishmael Butler, and Alice Coltrane into its fold has been made louder and prouder by the introduction of Steven Ellison—the electronic producer, rapper, filmmaker, and Brainfeeder label owner known as Flying Lotus. The grandnephew of the late Coltrane (and her husband, spiritualized saxophonist-composer John), Ellison has forever held the future in his DNA, with each album and anime soundtrack (see 2021’s Yasuke) pushing him further, and weirder, into the oblong orbit within the offshoots of Jupiter.
That’s what makes this new Spirit Box EP so odd, then. Yes, the reed-thin, room-shaking, subterranean steeliness of opener “Ajhussi” and the tin-tapped Twin Peaks tribute “Garmonbozia” are literally and figuratively “out there,” fitting easily into his back catalog. Yet the EP’s ping-ponging, rubbery “Ingo Swann” manages to be a simply pretty musical moment to bookend the diabolic metallic intro, a whistle-heavy house track with a programmed voice at the heart of the machine influenced by Lotus’ busy schedule of cinematic anime scores. Upon further examination, the sung-spoken “dream” inside the gooey center and sparkling arrangement of “Garmonbozia” could even be a lovely Pet Shop Boys song in disguise.
However, it’s the EP’s two prominent vocal tracks—Dawn Richard’s “Let Me Cook” and Sid Sriram’s “The Lost Girls”—that are the true surprises on Spirit Box. With its gorgeously light-as-clouds, up-sung vocal line and its Fender Rhodes electric piano-based tickle, “Let Me Cook” could’ve come from breezy fusion-funk avatars Pieces of a Dream in 1978, and been part of their wine-bar jazz revolution. That’s a compliment. “The Lost Girls,” too, sounds pulled from a past of Beat bongos, sweetly mumbled poetry, and swooshing, taffy-pulled sequencers. Another compliment.
Which brings me to where Spirit Box’s sense of forward futurism lies in 2024: somewhere between the hills of Mt. Airy in the late 1970s and discoid, Peech Brothers bouncy house sounds circa 1983’s Life Is Something Special. Going backwards to race ahead—very much a compliment, and something radically different for Flying Lotus.
