When you hear something you’ve never heard before, time stops.
You become stuck in the cement. And observe the rest of the world rotate around that piece of art. A moon-stomper blend of beat-scene energy, instrumental backpack radness, and wonk-forward hip-hop meets techno-glitch thump defines 1983, the debut studio album by electronic music producer Steven Ellison, under his moniker Flying Lotus. That’s the stuff right there.
Released by Plug Research on October 3, 2006, and named after Ellison’s year of birth, the single, the album, and the off-time/on-time swag declared, “We are now in a different era.” (20 years later, on April 18, Record Store Day is featuring a vinyl re-release at participating shops, remastered with a gold-spattered pressing.)
And while there was a bunch of successful ‘06 pop stars taking residence on Billboard’s charts, from Queen Bey to Justin Timberlake, and several adventurous producers breaking through with novel electronic sounds, nobody on the “overground” was movin’ like FlyLo’s production. Nobody.
According to the lore, 1983 was made in the comfort of Ellison’s grandmother’s bedroom, adding to FlyLo’s family mystique—yes, he’s the great-nephew of the late Alice Coltrane. But the ideas came from his “beat cypher” coterie: Carlos Niño, the late great Ras G, Gaslamp Killer, Dibiase, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Daedelus, and others who were twisting time signatures and hanging out at the Little Temple bar in Silver Lake. Daddy Kev’s party, Low End Theory, became the incubator for experimental hip-hop and electronic music coming out of LA’s underground from 2006-18, which rewired the definition of beat-music and its bass-heavy frequencies.
The participants pushed each other to reach for new ideas, and their innovations flew around the globe several times over.
But when the track “1983” blew through SF, it was one of those cuts… The intro alone could have been from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters,” mind you: “Shit was weird.” Any DJ worth their salt not only had it, but when they rolled to the gig, they’d ask the opening DJ, “Yo, did you play that FlyLo shit yet?” Or if you were playing with a crew, there was a rush to see who could mix it in on some off-the-wall type steeze. Everybody was geeked to hear that video game-essence of a beat coming out on a proper system. That’s how hard in the paint the track went. It possessed this airy, melodic, celestial kind of bump to it, channeling a spacey interiority.
Even the bass line needed a therapist; it too caught a case of the melancholy blues.
So the head-nod effect was pitched at about a 9.5, but Ellison’s use of vocals gave agency to the way melody hovered, levitated, and damn near schlep-rocked above the thumpasaurus production. Somehow, he did, in fact, pack Uncle George Clinton and Bernie Worrell in this version of the future. Whew.
FlyLo of course went on to help shape 21st-century music, building the Brainfeeder imprint into a Grammy-winning brand by way of Thudercat, Muldrow, and others. His successful foray into the cinematic arts, his Netflix anime series Yasuke, and his creation of the theme for Apple’s Magic Johnson doc, “They Call Me Magic.”
But for one keepsake moment in 2006, when Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook were all in their infancy stages, and DJT had his finger on the button of the sixth season of “The Apprentice,” Ellison made music itself, the goal. Flying Lotus made time stop. With a dangerously cool, nerd-forward, electronic instrumental anthem that flapped eccentrically weird in the wind, and bumped along funky as hell. Much like Fishbone and TV On The Radio, Flying Lotus made Black Nerds a thing again.
Now that was a moment.
1983 will be officially re-released on vinyl as part of Record Store Day April 18. Check out Record Store Day’s participating shops here. Grab the digital/streaming version on April 17 here.
