Flying Lotus: Los Angeles (2LP) [WARP]

Why you'll love it

This Warp 2LP set comes in a gatefold jacket, pressed in the EU. Resident Advisor ranked Los Angeles the third best album of 2008, and Pitchfork later placed it No. 14 among the 50 best IDM albums of all time.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Steven Ellison named his second album after his hometown, and it plays like a late drive across the city with the windows down and the radio slowly melting. The great-nephew of Alice Coltrane had grown up around spiritual jazz, came of age on hip hop, and found a way to fold both into woozy, head-nodding beat music that still felt brand new.

He produced and engineered all of it himself. "Brainfeeder" shares its name with the label he founded, "Camel" lurches like a scratched record learning to dance, "GNG BNG" and "Parisian Goldfish" hit hard, and "RobertaFlack" and "Auntie's Harp" drift into dreamier, harp-flecked space before "Auntie's Lock/Infinitum" floats the album home. The sleeve, designed by Build with photography by Timothy Saccenti, is as moody as the music, and the whole thing runs as one continuous flow, best heard start to finish.

Fact and Pitchfork both put it among the year's best, and it still sounds like the future of beat music. It is also, we can confirm, the record most likely to make a quiet afternoon in the shop feel like a film.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp (cat# WARPLP165), the 2008 album.