Flying Lotus on His Favorite Horror Movie and Video Game Composers
The musician and filmmaker breaks down the influences behind his new space thriller ‘Ash.’ Plus, a scoop about the newest Brainfeeder signee.
Ash, the second film directed by Flying Lotus, is a sci-fi horror story set in deep isolation. Riya (Eiza González), one of several crew members on a space expedition, awakens and discovers her fellow explorers are dead, with no memory of how it happened. Things become more complicated when Brion (Aaron Paul), a crewmate whom Riya doesn’t remember, appears and tries to help her solve the murder mystery while their oxygen levels fall. It plays like a mashup of films like Alien, Solaris, Moon, and Event Horizon, with a zoned-out FlyLo twist.
Flying Lotus also worked in isolation while composing the film’s score in New Zealand. A world away from his usual studio setup and personnel, he played with a bare minimum of tools—a MIDI controller and various plugins—to create a foreboding score that’s ambient one minute, blaring and tense the next. “It was a full-circle moment from making beats in my grandma’s house,” he says over Zoom with a smile. “It makes me want to sell so much of my gear because now I prefer to just keep it minimal and work with less.”
That’s a big change for Lotus, whose fusion of hip-hop, jazz, electronic, and orchestral music on albums like 2012’s Cosmogramma and 2014’s You’re Dead! could be comfortably described as maximal. Like that shift to the eerily pared-back sound of Ash, Lotus is excited to expand his range as a director beyond the madcap body-horror anthology of 2017’s Kuso, his first feature.
“I’ve always wanted to make a straight-up commercially accessible film. After I did Kuso, there was the question in people’s minds: Is this guy just an avant-garde crazy man who will only show strange-shaped objects on-screen? I couldn’t blame anyone for feeling that way, or not seeing my vision. With Ash, I wanted to take a big swing on something more approachable but that was very me as well.” Crafting this score while outside of his comfort zone played a big role in setting the tone for Ash, and proving to himself that necessity is truly the mother of invention.
Below, Flying Lotus discusses five horror and sci-fi composers who made an impact on the score for Ash, out now via Milan Records, and his work in general.
