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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

Photo courtesy of Ellen Qbertplaya | @Qbertplaya