Flying Lotus (or Alice Coltrane’s great-nephew) proves that Plug Research is the perfect home for him with his debut full-length, 1983. Sounding like a mix between Ammoncontact and Dntel, Lotus layers spacy keyboards over bass-heavy beats, clearly very much influenced by the whole free jazz-based electronica and hip-hop Sa-Ra craziness that’s prevalent in the L.A. area (he also takes a cue from Stones Throw producers Madlib and J Dilla, using fractured rhythms and subtle chords to propel the songs forward). However, unlike many of his labelmates, Lotus doesn’t drag out his pieces; instead, all but two of them fall neatly under four minutes, keeping 1983 from becoming a masturbatory exercise in keyboard lines and instead making it very…

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