1983

About

Long before “lo-fi beats” became synonymous with corporate mood music and infinitely looping study/cooking/whatever playlist, there was Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotu. A gamer and anime fan who started making music on a laptop while in film school, Ellison articulated a subculture you knew was there but had never been seen quite so clearly: nerdy kids who related to hip-hop more as a form of collage art than political expression, who loved colorful, surrealistic cartoon, who drank in serious influences—spiritual jazz, abstract electronic music—with a sense of play that made the music feel easy no matter how sophisticated the work behind it got. His first album, 2006’s <i>1983</i> (his birth year) still feels pivotal, a mix of squelchy synth, chopped-up sample, hazy ambience, and lopsided Dilla-esque drum programming whose overall mood was like a cool-kid update of ’50s exotica records—the faraway land you could reach without leaving your living room, aloha shirts included. It could feel funny (“Pet Monster Shotglass”), it could feel dreamy (“1983”), it could feel surprisingly strange and beautiful (“Orbit Brazil”), but above all, it had an essential pulse of creativity that heralded bigger thing. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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