Who is the Flying Lotus machine?

The best night at one of the best hip-hop clubs in LA: Low End Theory’s debut Unreleased Beat Invitational, when producer Daddy Kev says (like King Coleman said before him) show me what you got, and contenders line up to try out new beats in front of a ferociously literate crowd. Sweet smoke in the air—Airliner has an outdoor stage that’s perfect for these spring nights—as Nobody dumps out a block-rocker, and as Daedelus tries a cheerful little bleep-beep beat, and Life Rexall plays maybe some kind of $martyr outtake, and Kev sneaks in a track hanging from a Hawaiian guitar hook, and then somebody I’d never seen before—Flying Lotus, in light shirt and dark sunglasses, slipping onstage as MC Nocando announces that he’s brought his own custom mega-mix. During the 20th century we discovered that even something as simple as pressing a button demanded training, discipline and confidence; Lotus steps behind the Low End sound system (something he’ll tell me later he always has to resist overcranking) and the slimmest visible ripple runs through the smoke just as his first sharp kick drum freezes the speakers for a second. Then shock paralysis—a two-minute bite out of the night that I still can’t remember right.

Who was this guy? He looked real serious—Kev knows a lot of people, so maybe Lotus was an old ’90s warhorse with beats seething since birth, with racks of could-have-been classics just ready for dispatch—the kind of lemme-show-you-how-we-used-to-do guy you’ll sometimes see crawl out of a primered hatchback and glide the too-new shine off the turntables. But actually no—he was 23, from the Valley, and between that night in the spring and this article, he would become the first-ever LA musician signed to top-level tastemaker label Warp. So who was this guy, I asked Kev? “He’s a machine,” he said.

And he was—BTS Radio’s Andrew Meza was an early Lotus supporter, and he remembers Lotus sending him beats like every week. A new beat each day during that heat wave we had, Meza said—ask him. And I did and Lotus laughed: “Who told you that?” He’d named them all after hot-sounding things, like “Camel” and “Melt” and “Dehydrated,” and he’d test them out by going for long rides on Valley surface streets where he could listen to them 80 times in sequence and see how well they matched the light and blur outside. That was last month and his first Warp EP—Reset—had just come out as a test pressing: “It’s definitely a compliment because Warp is on some next shit,” he said. “They always wanna move forward, and they take a little kid from the Valley—that’s crazy! That gives me an opportunity—not just for myself, but to shine a light on people from town, too. I embrace that situation more than anything else.”

“There’s something bubbling in LA, and something about Warp acknowledging it is validation for the whole city,” says Kev. “Lotus to me has a subtle genius in programming—a real knack for strong bass lines, defined melody, a sound like it’s about to fall apart. He has a love not only for hip-hop music but he’s well educated about techno and house—he knows it backward and forward. He’s one of the few in LA that really merge the two—he puts on his own touch.”

It sounds . . . evil, Meza had said because he’d heard Reset before it came out; it also sounded deep and sick and distorted and tense (like Lotus’ “STUNTS” remix) or soft and unsettled (“Tea Leaf Dancers,” with Andreya Triana’s vocals processed down to the base dots) and you could tell how carefully he’d gone through his own songs, making sure nothing lasted too long. Warp knew what they were doing with Lotus, and even though he laughed and told me he was a really just a lazy bastard, I knew that wasn’t true: “When people put out wack-ass beats, they’re really making it easy for the rest of us,” he said. “Quote me on that.”

FLYING LOTUS WITH BLANK BLUE THE PROSPECTOR | 2400 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | 562.438.3839 | MYSPACE.COM/THEPROSPECTORLONGBEACH | THURS 10 PM | CONTACT VENUE FOR COVER | 21+

Tags: flying lotus, hip hop, local music, mp3, Music, prospector, warp