Photo by Tim Saccenti

Flying Lotus: You're Dead! Teaser (via SoundCloud)

“I have so much loss in my life that I might be an authority on the fucking subject,” says Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. He specifically mentions losing his parents, plus several other friends and family members. “It's tough when you're an artist because you get to go around the world and make a lot of friends, but guess what? One day, all these people that you love are going to die, from DJ Mehdi, to DJ Dusk, to J Dilla, to Austin Peralta, to DJ Rashad.”

But while Ellison’s upcoming fifth full-length, You’re Dead!, is all about endings, it’s never grim, exactly. This is a record about what’s actively happening to people as they die, and moments of it sound outright celebratory. “I try to think about these things with a tongue-in-cheek perspective,” he says, pointing out the exclamation point at the end of the album’s title. “I wanted it to be playful, because it's the one experience we have in common. I wanted to make something that captures death from different angles—from the sad moments, to the confusing moments, to maybe even the blissful and silly ones.”

Sure enough, as each voice on the album embarks on his or her death voyage, they approach the matter differently. Captain Murphy (Ellison’s rapping alter ego, appearing for the first time on a Flying Lotus album) seems confused as he realizes that he’s just crossed over. Kendrick Lamar sounds excited about the all-consuming darkness. Thundercat goes bleak, singing about the inevitability of nothingness. “We will live on forever,” sing Laura Darlington and Kimbra on “The Protest”, closing the album with hope (or denial). Only one voice comes from the land of the living, as Snoop Dogg stands over a corpse and wonders what happened on “Dead Man’s Tetris”.

You’re Dead! is an album full of far-reaching, hard-to-define threads, but Flying Lotus has never been one to shy away from unwieldy concepts; Cosmogramma, from 2010, was inspired by the study of the planets and their relationship to heaven and hell. Ellison’s records are odysseys that visit complex ideas while folding in powerful voices, and the list of supporting players here is particularly stacked. His collaborations with Kendrick, Snoop, and Herbie Hancock have been well-publicized, but buried in the liner notes are additional co-conspirators like Cosmogramma string arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Brendon Small, the guitar hero behind “Metalocalypse”’s cartoon band Dethklok and co-creator of the show.

Ellison says he initially approached You’re Dead! as a jazz record, but even with death on his mind, the album was never going resemble a bygone era of music. It’s a distinctly modern brew of hip-hop, footwork, and fusion that’s kinetic and vibrant. Still, it’s easy to compare Flying Lotus’ soundscapes to some of the more progressive icons of jazz. Hancock thinks so, too—he told Ellison that he and Thundercat should appear in the upcoming Miles Davis movie Miles Ahead, starring and directed by Don Cheadle, and that “if Miles was around today, he'd be hanging out with you guys.” He’s probably right.

Pitchfork: Have the ideas of death and the afterlife always been conceptually important to your work?

Flying Lotus: Absolutely. All of the Flying Lotus records are exploring similar themes: These questions in my mind about what's next and what's beyond. I try to think of these stories that are not so grounded in the world that we live in and that are coming from more of a futurist standpoint where it's like, “What else is out there? What could happen next? What would the moment of death sound like?”

With this album, I was trying to come in at that moment and navigate the different thoughts that might go through your mind. Maybe being in disbelief that you died. Maybe having regrets about things that you'd done in the past. Maybe finding comfort in dying and coming to grips with the fact that we never die—that's the overall message in the end.

Pitchfork: Do you believe in an afterlife?

FL: I believe there's more than this—that maybe when we die our brains conjure up some kind of shutdown experience, and that's what people try to sum up as the afterlife. But yeah, I think something else is going to happen and it's going to be crazy and confusing and weird, and we probably won't know what it's all about. It'll just be another place where we’re trying to understand why we exist at all.

Pitchfork: You intended for the concept here to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Do you feel like you’re following in the tradition of guys like Sun Ra or Miles Davis, who could be both conceptually heavy but still playful in their execution?

FL: I do, to be totally honest, without trying to big myself up here. I'm trying to add to the conversation. I don't want to make a record that Miles Davis could make, though; I wanted to make something that only I could make. I really want to go as far into my own ideas as possible. There's all these people out there trying to sound the same, trying to sound like the other guy, so I wanted to do the most “me” thing that I can do right now.

Pitchfork: Did you bring any new influences into the making of this record?

FL: Thundercat and I listened to a lot of metal in the beginning of making this album, believe it or not, just trying to approach things from a different space. I listened to a lot of Soft Machine, but I also listened to fucking Slayer. I got really into [guitarist] Brendon [Small]'s stuff, and he got me into Mastodon and Gojira. That shit was tight.

Pitchfork: This is the first time you’ve rapped on a Flying Lotus album. Did you have any hesitation to do that?

FL: Yeah, because I thought it would be smart to separate those two worlds. But they were definitely colliding—as Captain Murphy, I was writing songs about death, so it made sense. It's fun and it's more of a glimpse into what I hope for the albums to become in the future.

"Kendrick is a visionary thinker. He raps like I wish I could."

Pitchfork: How did you and Kendrick get connected?

FL: We have good chemistry, man. Every time we meet it's like, "Ah, man, we gotta do something together!" When he went on the Yeezus tour, he hit me to help him design a new show, and I'd never been asked to do anything like that before. Since then, we've been working on stuff together. I went on tour and he recorded to a bunch of my songs. I don't know if he's going to use them or not, but he recorded a bunch of stuff, which is why there's no Captain Murphy album out yet. He took all my beats!

Pitchfork: You’re just waiting to see which ones he doesn't use?

FL: Yeah! At this point, I don't even know! But he took 12 or 13 of my tracks, man. I think he recorded on all of them, too. I just don't know if they're ever going to see the light of day. There's actually another track that he did on this album that I had to take off for political reasons, but it was a really cool thing. He came to the house and laid it down and killed it. He didn't come with no entourage or nothing. It was real special to me. I appreciate that space when I can sit with the artist and really see how their genius works, and Kendrick is that guy. He's a visionary thinker. Every time he raps on a song, he raps like I wish I could.

Pitchfork: Are there other people that you wanted to appear on this record?

FL: Yes, actually. It's funny, Pharrell had expressed interest in working together on something, and I wrote "Siren Song" with him in mind, leading the way with his vocals. We tried to make it happen, but it just didn't work out. I like the song the way it turned out [with Angel Deradoorian], and she was definitely there first, but I imagined him in the pockets on that song. It was right before his album came out and there was just too much going on in his world to really focus. Plus, I think the concept of the album was kind of off-putting to him because he's, for lack of a better word, happy. You’re Dead! might've been a little much.