Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Yes, another Brainfeeder-related post. But I should have posted this long ago. On August 17th, electronic music artist Flying Lotus will release the final piece of his three-part L.A. EP series. The EPs are an extension of his second release on Warp Records, Los Angeles, featuring unreleased tracks and remixes by fellow producers such as Dimlite, Matthew David, Ras G, Take and others. The artwork and packaging for both the EPs and the album came about through a collaborative effort between Flying Lotus, photographer Timothy Saccenti, design studio Build and design studio Commonwealth.



Commonwealth is a New York-based studio founded in 2005 by Zoe Coombes and David Boira, experienced in manipulating materials to create organic forms for contemporary art and furniture design. The sculpture created for Los Angeles was meant to reflect the "total insanity of Flying Lotus' style", with photos taken at varying stages of decay. Their beautifully designed portfolio site includes more images and a video of the sculpture.



New York-based Timothy Saccenti, responsible for photographing the sculpture, has an extensive portfolio of music-related photo and video work. This includes images of Pharrel, Erykah Badu, Prefuse 73, Jamie Lidell, Lady Sovereign and a long list of other artists. In terms of Warp-related work, he's also responsible for the cover and video for Battles' album Mirrors, but that's worthy of an entirely new post, really.



And finally, the design work was handled by Build, founded in 2001 by Michael C. Place, handling clients such as Sony Computer Entertainment, Getty Images and several record labels. I particularly like this record sleeve designed for artist Sky Tucker. Build also has several images of Los Angeles' packaging on their portfolio site.



Above is a great short film posted by Commonwealth that very well could have summed up everything I just wrote. It also reveals that this project will lead to further works. Either way, Los Angeles is my favorite album of 2008, including the packaging. The covers of the album and EPs are a perfect match for the dark heavy beats within, like one of Flying Lotus' drawings come to life. I also recommend checking out Steve Serrato's work on Flying Lotus' Reset.

Flying Lotus
Commonwealth
Timothy Saccenti
Build
Stephen Serrato
Warp Records
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