A New Strain of Hip-Hop: Flying Lotus

This week The New Yorker's Sasha-Frere Jones profiles Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, whose album Los Angeles will shortly join our music collection.

Though Jones finds the Flying Lotus EPs more enjoyable than the album, he has positive things to say about Ellison and his peers:

What is exciting about Ellison and his friends is not that they execute every track cleanly and perfectly or that they are a hard-charging group set to change the sound of radio. Ellison, like many of the artists in this affinity group I’ve met, has hundreds of unheard tracks on his hard drive, some long, many short. How they deploy all these puzzle pieces ends up being the real connection to his august lineage. Though the laptop and the controller pad are the instruments of choice, this music has the improvisatory, loose feel of jazz.

XLR8R has a nice video of Ellison. Long-time Warp Records fans and Detroit techno heads take heed.