Music Video – Kill Your Co-Workers by Flying Lotus

If you can consider a laptop a musical instrument, then twenty-seven year old musical chemist Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus, is a maestro. Since his début album 1983 was released in 2006, FlyLo has been mixing bloops, beeps and beats into a style all his own, and has picked up a sizeable popular and critical fanbase in the process.

His most recent album, 2010’s excellent Cosmogramma, is a frenetic, fast-paced and fascinating piece of work which doesn’t so much ignore traditional musical sensibilities as electro-shock them into another dimension. A gifted composer of experimental music, Ellison’s records are nearly impossible to pin down, challenging the ear and the mind with sounds as diverse as orchestral strings and Game Boy bleeping. At the moment you wrap your mind around one track, another arrives and shifts your musical paradigm.

‘Kill Your Co-Workers’ – taken from FlyLo’s Pattern + Grid World EP – embraces elements of ambient electronica, techno and even drum-and-bass on its way to creating an irresistibly frantic beat/riff elixir.

Its video is similarly miscible; Ellison and animator Beeple conjure a strange contrast, as a geometrically rigid world of pixellated robots stages a huge parade which turns murderous. Combining irreverent humour, largely mocking internet and text speak, with sudden outbursts of 8-bit ultra-violence, its darkly humourous tone is driven by a seemingly benign setting – one which could feasibly be lifted from a 1980s Super Nintendo game for kids – being subjected to a mass robot revolt.

Beautifully coloured and drawn, the video for ‘Kill Your Co-Workers’ is a lot like FlyLo’s music: inimitable, hallucinatory and more than a little nuts. Makes for a volatile, but fun, combination.

Luke Grundy is a fervent assimilator of media living amid the bright lights of London, England. If he’s not watching films or listening to music, he’s probably asleep, eating or dead. An aspiring writer, journalist and musician, he is the creator of movie/music blog Odessa & Tucson and lives for epistemology.