Los Angeles, CA · experimental-hip-hop · beat-music

Flying Lotus

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Brainfeeder's founder — jazz lineage, hip-hop drums, and electronics that keep dissolving into each other, with Coltrane family blood and a 3D live rig.

Flying Lotus is Steven Ellison, a producer, rapper and filmmaker born in Los Angeles on October 7, 1983, with Cameroonian ancestry tracing back to the Tikar people. He is a grandson of songwriter Marilyn McLeod, who wrote "Love Hangover" for Diana Ross, and a grand-nephew of jazz pianist Alice Coltrane, a lineage that runs audibly through his music. He studied at the Los Angeles Film School and Academy of Art University.

He emerged through LA's beat scene in the late 2000s, sending tracks to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim under the Flying Lotus name in 2006 while interning at Stones Throw Records. His debut album, 1983, followed that year, and he signed to Warp in 2007, releasing Los Angeles in 2008 and pushing instrumental hip-hop toward free jazz, fusion and electronic abstraction, with live bass and keys sitting inside heavily processed, off-grid drum programming.

His 2010 album Cosmogramma folded afrofuturist soul, hip-hop, jazz and IDM together, with Thundercat on bass, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on strings and Rebekah Raff on harp, plus guest vocals from Thom Yorke and Laura Darlington. It won the Dance/Electronica prize at the Independent Music Awards. Further albums, including Until the Quiet Comes, You're Dead!, Flamagra and Yasuke, extended the same restless mix of genres.

He founded Brainfeeder, the label that has released music by Thundercat, Kamasi Washington and others, and has collaborated widely across hip-hop and jazz. He also raps under the name Captain Murphy, curated the in-game radio station FlyLo FM for Grand Theft Auto V, and has directed films including the 2025 sci-fi horror feature Ash. His live shows typically pair his beats with layered projected visuals.

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experimental-hip-hopbeat-music