Review Summary: The third in a three EP post-Los Angeles series, melding together remixes of Flying Lotus' unique style.
Los Angeles, the sophomore effort from Flying Lotus featured a plethora of sounds, rhythms and a penchant for just taking ideas and running with them. The multi-layered textures gave the album a rich depth, with a long list of influences thrown into the melting pot. Digesting the whole package and making some sense of it all however took its time. Hot on the heels of the album’s success came a series of three EPs featuring mashed up remixes of the content from
Los Angeles. The third in the series, comes with five remixes and two original pieces. Handing over the reins to his peers, the five remixed songs take the groundwork and smash it into pieces. Chopped up, mashed and reconstructed, the five different takes offer a whole lot more to take in and process.
The album may bear the name Flying Lotus, but ultimately each song is also very much a reflection of Flying Lotus’ contemporaries. In Los Angeles based artist Take’s remix of
Parisian Goldfish he takes a softer approach to the original, with a soft pattering ambience the dips in the trail. The fast and intense original is wound down and relaxed. Dimlite’s
Re-finitum on the other hand chops up Flying Lotus’ work and turns it into a piece of sharp angles and off-tones. While each interpretation differs strongly, the album blends together till at the end the listener can only provide a hazy recollection of song boundaries.
None of the remixes outstrip the pieces they stem from, yet his two original tracks
Spin Cycles and
Endless White offer some sounds that are sure to intrigue. Both stray away from the typically warm and full-bodied sound of
Los Angeles. Their construction is minimalist, with fewer layers and longer continuations of patterns.
Endless White stretches softly into the distance, never inclined to push down any note with force.
None of the three LA EPs match up to the perhaps unwieldy full-length
Los Angeles. The third in the series,
LA EP 3X3 offers a range of unique mash-ups that in many ways reflect the styles of the remixer as much as Flying Lotus himself. Very much in the style of Flying Lotus, the songs meld together into one continuous ever-morphing beat and sound. His two original pieces on the EP offer a new minimalist style, one that many will likely want to see a repeat of. Never groundbreaking, nor ever really feeling like the main course;
LA EP 3X3 still offers a great deal for fans of Flying Lotus.
