Over the last few years, the boys over at Warp Records have been continuously putting out high-quality music. This year, Cosmogramma joins other landmark releases from Warp as a shining example of what a good electronic music producer is capable of doing. Flying Lotus has created an expansive, attention grabbing work eerily similar in its aspirations to 2007's Untrue. Although certainly less isolationist and perhaps more spiritual, Cosmogramma and Untrue serve fundamentally to answer the same contemplative existentialist questions.
It has been mentioned before that probably the first sign of quality in this album is that Steven Ellison put so much effort into the introduction to his album, which spans across four of the album's incredible seventeen tracks. Within the first ten seconds of the introduction, Ellison demonstrates his orchestral mastery with a fluttering introduction of the bassline, alluding perhaps to the latent themes of metamorphosis, as with a butterfly, or eternity, as with the continually expanding and contracting universe.
Thom Yorke makes an excellent guest appearance, quelling the dangerously unfocused tendency of Ellison's themes towards the astronomical with his own brand of meditation and isolationism. This same delicate attention to balance between intro- and extroversion is paid throughout Cosmogramma, notably between Laura Darlington's cameo in Table Tennis and Galaxy in Janaki, a song which, for all of its allusions to the womb of the Goddess Sita and the spiritual womb of the universe, comes across as Ellison's greatest exposition into the eternal and encompassing nature of the seemingly biological, pulsating universe.
Cosmogramma commands attention. A work of such depth should be listened to with the same attitude that went into producing it, but if you're looking for something less engaging, Cosmogramma can accomplish that task just as well.
Get it in FLAC.
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