Flying Lotus: L.A.'s Burial?

Given how the last few years have been so fallow for mainstream L.A. hip-hop, plenty of post-Dilla indie stalwarts are making a run at establishing a dominant local sound of fuzzy soul samples and virtuosic cut-and-paste beats. But the producer Flying Lotus might be the best of the bunch, precisely because he's the least traditionally hip-hop of them all. First off, his June debut full-length for Warp Records, "Los Angeles," is mostly instrumental. And those instrumentals are blinding thickets of reverb, alien techno noise and heavily treated vocal snippets.

The brainy eclecticism seems to run in the family -- his aunt is Alice Coltrane -- and he's booked at the classical-leaning Wordless Music Festival in New York next month, with remixes of Kelis and, of all people, local wispy folkstress Mia Doi Todd under his belt. But even more than Dilla or Stones Throw, Flying Lotus' sonic concoction evokes another producer fond of pirate-radio static and the existential loneliness of urban life, and hopefully, "Los Angeles" will generate some comparable level of excitement.

-- August Brown

Photo from Flying Lotus' MySpace page