Cosmogramma

Even though the steady presence of featured performances helps beautify Cosmogramma, this is essentially Ellison's crowning achievement. The album is sequenced with a sense of purpose, evidential from the promo being presented as a long continuous track.

Cosmogramma bursts with inventiveness; I've found myself careening around my apartment to sounds I don't recognize as of this Earth. That Lotus takes these vibrant ideas and sets them to pulses that move asses is incredible. Apparently everyone else is bouncing along in agreement.

“Cosmogramma” is ambitious, wonky, slippery, glitchy, and beautiful.

Flying Lotus' third album is by far his most diverse, loaded with elements of jazz, hip hop, and countless hybrids of electronic music. It's dense, boundless, engaging, and fun.

Fans of experimetal electronica will be [happy], though Radiohead devotees should exercise caution.

By honing and blending electronic hip-hop, jazz and skittering bass sonics into dramatic textures and patterns, Ellison has already demonstrated that he’s got the handle on the vision thing.

Woozy, off-track beats blend with video game blips and organic strings, harp and sax, while a cameo from Thom Yorke is woven neatly into this lush, psychedelic fabric.

Add in a dabbling in the spirit of free jazz and one might expect this album to be a wilfully discordant aural trial. But it turns out to be quite the opposite. The parts may be disparate but they are made to submit to an abiding mood of vivacity and sunniness.

Dense and obtuse it may be but those who follow this most intense sonic explorer will be rewarded the greatest.

An ambitious, challenging album from a sonic visionary, proving FlyLo is virtually peerless – perhaps only Brainfeeder labelmate Daedelus can touch him. Not for those who enjoy verse-chorus-verse or four-on-the-floor – but true aesthetes will devour Comsogramma with relish.

The musical legends that guest star here wouldn’t trust Flying Lotus if he didn’t trust himself—and trust is what makes this album work. Cosmogramma stays unpredictable without going too far off course, and uses unconventional sounds to deliver digestible results.

Cosmogramma is futuristic magnum opus that will indubitably be heralded as one of th emost intrepid albums of 2010.

You should stick around and see the vivid pictures Flying Lotus skillfully paints for you as you make your way through the mysterious maze that is Cosmogramma.

Warm and inviting, his latest opus occasions swan dives into future soul, funky dubstep ("Dance of the Pseudo Nymph"), Theo Parrish–styled house ("Do the Astral Plane"), and astonishingly, Sun Ra jazz ("Arkestry").

Picking us up where the laptop prof's 'Los Angeles' debut dropped us for another nocturnal journey through LA that serves as a moody, widescreen, be-bopping riposte to UK dubstep. Only this time it's a flashier ride.

Proclamations of his greatness may be slightly exaggerated, but Cosmogramma certainly adds to a deservedly growing reputation.

Cosmogramma is dense and devotional, Ellison piloting his craft into the fading slipstream of his aunt Alice Coltrane’s cosmic strain of jazz.

Whether or not it’s deserving of the hype it has so far accrued is neither here nor there, but I can’t help but feel that should the promo push for it have been more subdued in its approach, it may have benefited the album, and Lotus, in the long run.

Like flicking through pirate radio stations, ‘Cosmo…’ dances between the extremes but when it levels out and you’re rewarded with blankets of warm, rolling melody, you can’t help but be seduced.

There's some info overload, but Ellison is an ace with pacing, and a distracted soulfulness guides the frantic laptop science.

Slipping through dubstep, garage, techno and hip-hop, Ellison's study of electronica created with the benefit of live instrumentation presents occasional orgiastic treats, but is mostly nothing more than an anti-mellifluous exercise in listener-satisfaction which, in the long term, is likely to render 'Cosmogramma' more an anachronism than cosmogram.