Getting right down to brass tacks for this sixth edition of Klap’s Koachella, because frankly I’m still in the process of scraping my brain off the desert floor for what was one of my favorite Coachellas in recent memory. The weather? Pristine – apparently Friday was the coolest of the festival, but it was appropriately scorching in the afternoon (yet without reducing me to a puddle) and blessedly refreshing as the sun went down and people started generating their own pharmaceutical heat. The food? Better than ever – some of the samples this year included gourmet pop-up restaurants from celebrity chefs like Roy Choi and Kris Morningstar, an absolutely filthy hot dog stand, and old, artery-clogging standbys like my one true love, a heaping mound of garlic crab fries. The crowd? Eh; you win some, you lose some. But the drawing point remains as on point as ever – the artists by and large killed it, whether or not you supplemented your experience with any number of mind-altering substances that surely resulted in some sort of medical tent record, given the lax security I experienced in relation to past years. The best treatment for post-Coachella depression is reliving it.
Waking up for the first day always leaves me giddy, largely because you never know how thoroughly security will search you on that maiden voyage through one of the festival’s many clogged entrances. For this year, my group and I had assembled…
Where Friday was cold, dreary and windy, Saturday was merely cold and windy. The sun maintained a long vigil during the day, but razor sharp gusts and a high that barely cleared 70 degrees made sure Coachella kept making a pretty penny on hoodie sales. 2:30 in the afternoon is not necessarily morning, but it always feels like that, with the majority of the festival still in their tents or beds recovering from the night before. Destroyer didn’t seem to mind, though; playing a seven song set heavy in Kaputt cuts, Bejar was in fine form for the afternoon mood. Many enjoyed the suave jazz of “Chinatown” and the hazy “Bay of Pigs” from blankets in the grass, an appropriately dreamy soundtrack as the sun beat down on them and most people unwillingly began their day.
After that I kicked up the energy a bit for Zeds Dead’s set at the Sahara. Already way past full, the Sahara tent was rocking with the Mad Decent duo’s eclectic mix of hip-hop, dubstep and straight-ahead electro. Although Zeds Dead killed it, the already rowdy antics of much of the Sahara’s population had me swearing off the tent for the rest of the day, a decision made easier by future Sahara tenants (David Guetta, Martin Solveig, Sebastian Ingrosso … ehh, I’ll pass). I managed to catch the end of Britpop castaways Kaiser Chiefs on the Main Stage, where the band still made a go of it…
You know, I can’t even explain how Flying Lotus’s music is so good. For all intents and purposes, it takes a fairly standard hip-hop beat, slightly Dillafied, and puts subtle jazz music over it. It’s subdued, subtle, and somehow powerfully effective. For those of us who want something more immediate, something more aggressive, Flying Lotus’s imprint label Brainfeeder has released something fresh. Lorn, a 23 year-old producer from Illinois, has just released his debut album Nothing Else, which uses the same format as Flying Lotus–an album of shorter cuts of repetitive beats–but instead of using a heavy jazz influence, Lorn uses elements of glitch, dubstep, and breakbeat electronica. “Automation” is a longer cut on the album, and perhaps one of the most aggressive and dark found on the consistently excellent album.
“Do the Astral Plane” is Flying Lotus’ late-album reminder that you’re supposed to be having fun. Forget all the self-serious overanalyzing. Don’t mind the perfect scores and the dazed, knee-jerk responses like “blown away” or “shit-hot.” Enjoy precisely what holds this collage of experiments above its pretensions: you can laugh, long and hard. From that goofy opening beatbox to the sweeping strings, right down to the album’s most generous and easily digestible beat, Flying Lotus bounds across the line between cred-approved irony and actually surrendering to these melodramatic DJ tropes, amping up each element in an ascending escalator of synths and horns. Anything goes by the time you’re thinking “free jazz” at the expense of Nintendo glitches. I can only imagine what “do the astral plane” can mean for a track this flamboyant and sexy.
Note: This youtube version of the song includes the outro of “Mmmhmm,” the track preceding this on Cosmogramma. This is preferable for your listening pleasure for the sake of continuity and, well, it’s great. Just really great. Tell all your friends.
