Flying Lotus Title
As we inch nearer to his upcoming LP You're Dead!, Flying Lotus seems to be pulling us down into depths unknown, and his latest ochre undertow comes in the form of a brand new track.
"Moment of Hesitation" was unleashed upon the world this weekend during Gilles Peterson's BBC Radio 6 program. The cut features both jazz legend Herbie Hancock on electric piano and Thundercat on bass and is a swirling jazz excursion reminiscent of Bitches Brew and Return to Forever. The Herbie collab was one of the first of the many features that were brought in for the You're Dead! sessions, and Steven Ellison (FlyLo's earth-name) told Peterson "It's mostly a jazz record, still. It was going to be super traditional and by the books in its original incarnation."
"I definitely had a feeling [Herbie] was hit a little bit," FlyLo told Peterson. "He was really into it. He was really excited to work with me...it was really flattering. It really gave me a lot of confidence to see it through." That confidence seeps out between every brush stroke and lunar-lit keys run on "A Moment of Hesitation." The track is really anything but hesitant, as Thundercat and saxophonist Kamasi Washington trade angular runs from above and below while Ellison keeps watch, tweaking strings and processing cymbal hits. Listen to it and you can feel ghosts crawling under your fingernails. If the rest of You're Dead! is this unchained, then may Miles have mercy on our souls.
Does the world stop for stop for FlyLo? It certainly shifts. It certainly stutters. Clocks spin, colours flare and the shoots of strange plants spring up beneath our feet. To call his visionary work "beatmaking"--to label Flying Lotus a "producer"--is a failed simplification. Inside his songs the virtual becomes reality; the human is made machine; warm red blood courses through fiber-optic cables. His work defies dictionaries. Our dichotomies are dead.
Flying Lotus explains "Moment of Hesitation" + snippet:
