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Flying Lotus Takes a Sold-Out Brooklyn Mirage on a Wild Ride

Flying Lotus – Brooklyn Mirage – August 30, 2019

So, Flying Lotus is science fiction. Remember that scene from Interstellar where David Gyasi’s character explains to Matthew McConaughey’s how wormholes work by folding a piece of paper and poking through it with a pen? Flying Lotus is like that—impossible numbers of places and things smashed together, everywhere at once and always in transit. It’s so many genres it could be called antigenre: funk, electronica, contemporary classical, West Coast hip-hop. It’s an Octavia Butler story, a refraction of black musical traditions that reveals their surrealism. In Flying Lotus’s music, here we are, the first cosmonauts, the alien abductees, the telepaths, the sufferers of body horror. The ambient psychedelia of being black concentrated into 90 minutes.

Onstage at Brooklyn Mirage on Friday night, FlyLo was an icon, smiling, laughing and unforgiving, on a path from which he couldn’t be diverted (you might as well try to stop a spaceship with your bare hands). So, moving music into the third dimension … again, it tracks. Flying Lotus “in 3D” was an intimidating, futuristic behemoth, surrounded by an armada of projectors floating on obelisks jutting out of the ground, and dislocated an entire sold-out audience from conventional space-time. It tracks.

Songs from You’re Dead! became travails through a real underworld. Scenes from Flying Lotus’s film directorial debut, Kuso, a carnival of grotesqueries, became real horrors. Flamagra took us to another dimension—it’s our world, but it’s also not. And through it all, FlyLo was in stitches. For the last song of the night, “Them Changes,” Thundercat and Chris Rock emerged as if from nowhere: “Nobody move, there’s blood on the floor.” We couldn’t have even if we’d wanted to. Warping mishaps can have brutal consequences—these delights are violent. In this antigenre conglomerate (or is it just time travel?), every lurching movement between genre and musical lexicon is a wormhole. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

Produkttester Review Deutsch Digitales Diktiergerät 32GB

The new Bond St. District album is absolutely mind blowing.  Wow.  I don’t even know what else there is to say about this, other than you’re a fool if you don’t listen to this.  Pure genius. 

J. Laurie being a sweet friend of mine, I wanted to review her debut novel after (finally) finishing it this weekend. The short version is: read it!

Jessica Laurie’s debut novel Breathe is a solid first entry for the burgeoning author. This book is equal parts quirky, warm, and thoughtful, the kind of book best read wrapped up next to the window with a cup of tea on a lazy weekend. It reads like both a mystery and a fantasy. I couldn't wait uncover all of the character’s secrets. Each character is written well, fulfilling needed roles in the narrative but there is no doubt someone here that any reader could identify with. Dillon and Hope, whose journey we follow, were the two main stand-outs for me. Dillon’s dry humor and cynicism is something I could identify with and Hope’s curiosity and enthrallment with the magical world she’s thrust in. The two of them kept me turning the pages. Laurie successfully mixes a world of fantasy with a stark reality to bring her characters to a place of hope and redemption and she does this without the book feeling overly preach-ey, which is no small feat in this book’s genre. The author gently leads the reader to the places of hope and redemption her characters are pursuing and because of that this book was a beautiful reminder of the gentleness and care with which our Heavenly Father cares for us. Nearly every ounce of spirituality this book offers feels natural and each character has their own approach to it, reflecting the different experiences and stages of life they’re in. The Garden scenes were particularly touching in this way, Laurie paints us a picture of Christ that is not unlike C.S. Lewis’ Aslan (no doubt an influence here) so it feels very familiar but is also unique in and of itself. Overall this was an enjoyable read. The author’s fingerprints are left all over with sweet quotes and poems between chapters that almost nod to what is ahead for the reader. It also contains several handfuls of literary and nerd-culture references which add to the fun and make you think you hear Julie Andrews singing “My Favorite Things” in the distance. While not super ambitious, it genuinely accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish and has a solid finish with both excitement and warmth. It’s real without being stark, fun without being distracting, light without being vapid, spiritual without being forced, and warm without being too cheesy. Would recommend!