Where his recent work has ventured deep into the previously unexplored avant-garde reaches of contemporary electronic music, hip hop and jazz, Flying Lotus’s score to renowned anime creators Studio MAPPA’s Netflix original series Yasuke – on which he also acts as an executive producer and story consultant – sees FlyLo eschew his digital maximalism with rumblings of traditional instrumentation and widescreen cinematic scope.
Yasuke tells the story of a samurai warrior of African descent in a fantastical alternate universe version of feudal Japan full of magic, mechs, and of course, swordplay.
With a soundtrack of Morricone style epic tones, traditional Japanese percussion instruments and West African percussion, the feudal yet futuristic world of Yasuke is summoned.
‘You haven't really heard an anime score do a Blade Runner thing,’ he says, ‘I was like, “let me try and get into the headspace of that” but also there were several things that were part of the recipe for me. I thought about when Dilla would sample [Isao] Tomita and people like Vangelis, and how he had a [signature] sound when he did that sort of thing.’
Another spellbinding FlyLo release even without the stylish animations of the show.