Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma (2LP) [WARP]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set comes in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves and a download card. Cosmogramma scored 86 on Metacritic, the best-reviewed electronic album of 2010, and Pitchfork gave it 8.8.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gatefold jacket
• Printed inner sleeves
• Download card included

About the album

Some records are made in big studios. Cosmogramma was made in a Los Angeles apartment, with a few sounds captured in a hospital room. Steven Ellison recorded it while grieving his mother, who died in 2008 not long after his great-aunt, Alice Coltrane, and the title is a word he misheard in Alice's teachings about a "cosmic drama." He kept the misheard version, and he was right to.

Thom Yorke floats through "...And the World Laughs with You," Thundercat's bass drives "MmmHmm" and he scats over "Do the Astral Plane," while Ravi Coltrane's saxophone and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's strings wind around the beats. "Drips//Auntie's Harp" samples Alice Coltrane's harp, and "Galaxy in Janaki" closes the album with the sounds of his mother's hospital monitors turned into something gentle.

It reached No. 3 on the US dance albums chart and turned up on decade-end lists from Pitchfork, The A.V. Club and Consequence. Gilles Peterson named it his album of the year in 2011, a year after it came out, which is the kind of punctuality we aspire to with special orders.

Also at Kops: more Flying Lotus on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp (cat# WARPLP195), the 2010 album.