BIG MAMA is packed with Game Boy and retro sounds, with 8-bit samples from the early 1990s. Flying Lotus does not use them as a nostalgic effect, but as material for controlled chaos. These sounds run through the tracks like small fragments. You hear Mario, and that familiar noise when he picks up a mushroom or a star. Then it starts: experimental, rapid rhythms create agitation and release an energy that generates tension before discharging in loud bursts. BIG MAMA never feels arbitrary, though. It is precisely from its ruptures and overlaps that the EP draws its shape.
Previously, FlyLo had been working on the soundtrack to his latest feature film Ash. BIG MAMA is the counterprogramme: creative chaos that nevertheless follows its own logic. From a sketchbook emerged daily musical fragments lasting ten to fifteen seconds, produced with software synthesisers and drum machines. In the end, the beatmaker assembled everything into a whole. The result, across seven tracks, is music whose individual parts remain chaotic in themselves, yet whose overall structure is remarkably precise.
The videos accompanying this roughly 13-minute stream of consciousness follow the same principle: wild associations and curiosities that form the visual counterpart to a release that does not merely display disorder, but transforms it into energy.
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