Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma (Warp)

Steven Ellison, the artist known as Flying Lotus, was already widely praised for his 2008 album Los Angeles, but Cosmogramma is a jaw-droppingly awesome leap forward in imagination and creativity. In a year that's already gifted us with many fine and surprising electronica albums, in my non-specialist opinion this is the main contender for best of 2010.

I'm not exactly an aficionado of electronic dance music, because frankly I hate a lot of it. But FlyLo not only mostly avoids what I dislike (robotic and over-insistent beats, unremittingly dense textures), he even recontextualizes some aspects of styles I don't like (house, hardcore techno) so that I enjoy them. And he's all over the map here.

The stylistic eclecticism evident on Los Angeles burgeons spectacularly on Cosmogramma - drum 'n' bass, trip-hop, jungle, glitch, and dubstep (and the aforementioned sub-genres, plus probably stuff I can't recognize or name) beats mix with ambient, fusion jazz, mellow funk, new age and what we used to call "mood music" (love the wordless, coolly cooing group vocals that frequently pop up), a dazzlingly subtle array of sampled snippets, and collaborations with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of John and Alice Coltrane, the latter Ellison's great aunt), harpist Rebekah Raff, Thundercat (bass, vocals), singers Thom Yorke, Niki Randa, and Laura Darlington, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (string arrangements; he's previously worked with Erykah Badu and Outkast), and more, with Yorke, Thundercat, and Darlington co-writing their tracks.

And the vocal tracks with lyrics work well even without ever really qualifying as songs; "MmmHmm" in particular is a quietly catchy little ditty. The man can even make music from ping-pong balls. This is one of those rare electronica albums that's so original that it will appeal to listeners who don't even care about electronica. - Steve Holtje

Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer who splits his time between editing Culturecatch.com, working at the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix, and editing cognitive neuroscience books for Oxford University Press. No prizes for guessing which pays best.