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Flying Lotus raised the height of his electro-sonic game when he released in May this year his second full-length album Cosmogramma on Warp records, an unusual album through-in and through-out its content, style and visual form (with artwork by Leigh J. McCloseky, look up Codex Tor!).
Cosmogramma is constructed by 17 pieces, from 17 seconds to 3 minutes 20 sections; each piece titled and punctuated by unexpected wording ('Pickled!' , 'Nose Art', 'Table tennis', etc). This is not a new feature of Flying Lotus' touch however, rather it is the mark of his ever productive bend, present and evolving ever since his first dubsteps. As random as these uncategorisable tiny timed pieces and their longer siblings appear at first, they always self-audio explain their unique character as soon as you will hit play, thus falling tightly snug into the seat-beat that Flying Lotus has composed, for them, and in them.
Cosmogramma is a space opera, thus has Warp records presented it. When it was released to the press it was handed as a one long play, a very fitting format because, although dividable in the said 17 parts, each track runs inside and outside of its selves, like natural phrases in the logic of poetics rather than synthetic broken units.
Haven't listened to it yet? Let us tempt you...
The story of dubstep has been caught and written in silver on screen in a documentary just released by the SRK team. Bassweight is the latest film of The SRK, London-based modern chroniclers of key urban movements.
Dubstep is a London music child, shaped and produced by beat makers and rhythm players who built, from the foundations of dark dark garage and 2-step, a bass line so wickedly spellbinding it enraptured music lovers and spinners across the globe, from the UK to Amsterdam, Russia, Brazil all the way back again.
To tell the story of dubstep, the SRK zoom their lens close-up on this underground world as it once was, and has now become, taking for their narrator the voice of all the major players of the movement: from Dirrty Goodz of the Big Apple record store (vintage footage), Benga, Skream, Hijak, N–Type and Mary Anne Hobbs of Radio 1’s Dubstep Warz, to an ensuing impressive line up who subsequently picks up the narration.
A phenomena which crosses all genres and music lovers, the dubstep genre has been praised due to its encapsulation of the euphoric dance, trance and house formats as well as the murky production credits of Garage and Grime. So when three of the genre’s powerhouses came together to form a superteam, anticipation for a release ran across a majority of music platforms.
Producers and DJs Benga, Skream and Artwork are