Flying Lotus explores the afterlife in new album

Asked about the genesis of his trippy, atmospheric beat-based concept album You're Dead!, producer Flying Lotus describes it as occurring while he was rolling around Los Angeles, "driving my car with Thundercat, who plays bass on all the stuff".

"We were driving around listening to George Duke, and there was a moment when we were tripping on how crazy all that playing was," says the 31-year-old artist born Steven Ellison. They kept listening, admiring the ways in which fusion keyboardist Duke and his band conveyed so much melody, harmony and rhythm.

"We were like, 'Why aren't people doing this kind of … now?' Well, why don't we make some … like this, that just kills everybody." Ellison laughs. "When you hear it you're like, 'Oh … you're dead!'"

A few years later, Flying Lotus and longtime collaborator Thundercat (off-duty name: Stephen Bruner) have completed You're Dead!. Released this month, the 19-track, 60-minute-plus beat-based record is a singular document - it explores the imagined moments after the soul passes the threshold into the afterlife.

Built layer by layer, instrument by instrument over two years at Ellison's home studios, first in Echo Park and later in his new Laurel Canyon spot, the album draws on several influences, including fusion and hard-bop jazz, hip-hop, funk, soul and rock, and features session work and verses from jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, rappers Kendrick Lamar and Snoop Dogg, vocalists Angel and Arlene Deradoorian, Niki Randa and others.

An expansive, breathtaking feat of production wizardry and instrumental and lyrical acumen, You're Dead! sucks the listener through a wormhole into the realm of genre-free rhythm music. It's a place Ellison's family knows well. The grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, the late free-jazz spiritualist and widow of tenor sax genius John Coltrane, Ellison has inherited his aunt's sense of expansiveness and pushed it further towards some cosmic intersection.