Flying Lotus: Inside the Mind of a Mad Beat Scientist
“Is this Grape Ape?” asks Steven Ellison. He picks up the baggie of medical-grade marijuana and gives it a loving sniff: “Mmmmm. That’s one of my favorite strains.”
At 6 p.m., Ellison – better known as Flying Lotus, the DJ and producer whose fifth LP, the cosmically adventurous EDM-jazz-hip-hop suite You’re Dead!, recently cracked Billboard’s Top 20 – has just climbed back onto his tour bus, which is parked outside the Boston club where he’ll play a sold-out show later tonight. The inside of the bus looks pretty much like what you’d expect from a vehicle belonging to the guy who made the year’s trippiest album: rainbow-dyed crystals set into the ceiling and walls, weed everywhere, an incense stick smoldering in the sink, a weird eye chart (A X YUIZ ÅDKVY . . .) hanging near an almost empty bottle of Hennessy.
The 31-year-old, six-foot-two artist stops for a second to say hi to the handful of tourmates and buddies burning down joints and playing the swords-and-sorcery game Diablo III on Xbox in the bus’s front room. But he doesn’t sit down to join them, instead heading straight to his bedroom, where he flops into bed and shuts out the world. His good friend and musical foil Stephen Bruner, a.k.a. bass wizard Thundercat, shrugs as Ellison closes his door. “Lotus likes to stay on the bus,” Thundercat says. “It’s just how he is.”
Over the past eight years, Ellison has established himself as a collaborative equal to visionaries like Erykah Badu and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “Some of the most exciting things that have happened to me recently have been when Fly Lo dragged me to Low End Theory,” Yorke told Rolling Stone last year, referencing the hip L.A. club night that Ellison helped make internationally famous. “The music’s bonkers.”
You’re Dead!, featuring A-list rappers including Kendrick Lamar and Snoop Dogg, is taking Ellison even higher. Hours before the show, there are already dozens of young fans lining up outside the club, and every few minutes one of them knocks on the bus’s door in hopes of meeting his or her hero. They all get turned away. “I’m just a moody person,” he says when he finally invites me into the room where he’s been hiding all evening – a plusher space with keyboards lying around – at 9 p.m. “I need doses of excitement. I don’t like to be in the thick of it all the time. And that includes being around people.”
Ellison traces his withdrawn nature to his childhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, where he was raised by his single mother, who dreamed of being an actress, and his grandmother, a former Motown songwriter (she penned Diana Ross’ “Love Hangover”). “I was taught to keep secrets,” he says, taking a hit off an asthma inhaler. “In my house, no one ever really knew how anyone felt. It was always like, ‘Everyone’s fine, it’s all good!’ – even if it wasn’t. People don’t like to confront the real things.”