Wiki
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Release Date
2 May 2010
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Length
17 tracks
Cosmogramma is the third studio album by American music producer Steven Ellison as Flying Lotus, released by Warp Records on May 3, 2010. The title comes from an incident when he was listening to an Ashram lecture from his great-aunt Alice Coltrane and he misheard the words "cosmic drama" as cosmogramma.
The album was awarded the top spot in Exclaim! Magazine's annual ranking of Electronic albums.
Dimitri Nasrallah writes of Flying Lotus: "In the five years since he first appeared on the scene, the Los Angeles native's talents have grown in such leaps and bounds that he now finds himself pioneering a full-blown West-Coast beats renaissance."
More recently, it was ranked the 14th best album of 2010 by Pitchfork Media and #1 album of the year at the Gilles Peterson World Wide Awards 2011. The song "...And the World Laughs with You" was featured in the HBO TV series True Blood (season 4, episode 2).
Recording sessions began in October 2008 in Ellison's apartment in Los Angeles, immediately following his previous album and the death of his mother. Ellison used a laptop, a sampler and a drum machine, along with live instruments. The album draws conceptually on lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences, with contributions from Laura Darlington, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Niki Randa, Thom Yorke, Ravi Coltrane, Rebekah Raff and Thundercat.
Cosmogramma is an eclectic electronica, experimental, IDM and nu jazz record, with influences spanning numerous genres, including psychedelic hip-hop and glitch. Its songs were described by journalists as multi-layered, dense, varied and with extensive production techniques, incorporating a maximalist and Afrofuturist style.
Cosmogramma was promoted with a free "augmented reality" application called Cosmogramma Fieldlines. Though Ellison released no singles, he went on a tour through Canada, Europe, and United States in promotion of the album. The album entered and peaked at number 60 on the UK Albums Chart, and at number 88 on the US Billboard 200 chart. Upon release, the album received widespread critical acclaim, and was placed on numerous year-end lists. In 2011, Ellison released a compilation of B-sides, Cosmogramma Alt Takes. At the turn of the decade, several publications listed Cosmogramma among the greatest albums of the 2010s.
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