Flying Lotus Reset EP

Warp offers a tantalizing taste of something called Flying Lotus with the new Reset EP. Six quick tracks of nifty beats, alternately smooth and rough, with the appropriate sheen of sci-fi lasers. It is a good indication that this record, instrumentally, vaguely recalls the work that hip hop visionaries Antipop Consortium did on the electronic label.

Opening track Tea Leaf Dancers is a smooth affair, all effervescent synth strokes and crackling beat with a decorative laid back female vocal. It is somewhat misleading, as the rest of the tracks concentrate on instrumentals with a definite hip hop backbone and an eccentric futurist heart. Vegas Collie sounds like a b-boy throw down refusing to be interrupted by an alien visitation, and that sets the aesthetic as well as anything else.

Bonus Beat and Massage Situation likewise stay tightly locked in a conventional boom bap groove, but there is a scintillating sparseness to the percussion sounds as sources drift in and out to skew strangely over the beat. Spicy Sammich carries this static as well, surprising in the middle when the minimal beat drops out, only to return with a menacing b-boy flair, pushing the track into new spaces throughout the remainder.

Flying Lotus seems to have some of the audio restlessness of a Madlib, wandering into new places every thirty seconds or minute. Dance Floor Stalker may be a minor masterpiece of tongue in cheek rising and falling tension, set to an airtight dance beat.

Running less than 18 minutes, Flying Lotus lets no filler leak into the Reset EP, though it is difficult to tell if he is capable of delivering a full length quite so entertaining. I'm curious to know, so I suppose this release did its job.