Flying Lotus - Yasuke

Yasuke is a soundtrack album by American music producer and DJ Flying Lotus, released in April 2021 via Warp Records.

Steven Ellison, known by his stage name Flying Lotus or sometimes FlyLo, is an experimental multi-genre music producer, electronic musician, DJ and rapper from Los Angeles, California.

Flying Lotus has released six studio albums 1983 (2006), Los Angeles (2008), Cosmogramma (2010), Until the Quiet Comes (2012), You're Dead! (2014) and Flamagra (2019) to increasing critical acclaim. He has produced much of the bumper music on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block.

Three years in the making, Netflix’s Yasuke is a six-episode anime series created by Bronx-bred and Japan-based television animation creator, producer, and director LeSean Thomas (Cannon Busters, Children of Ether, The Boondocks) and starring actor / executive producer LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Sorry To Bother You) as the voice of the title character.

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.

A dream project for the producer, Flying Lotus consulted on the story, working alongside renowned anime creators Studio MAPPA as an executive producer on the project. The skillset of the Grammy award winning producer is on complete display on the album, hybridizing synth melodies, bass lines and machine generated drum patterns while exploring new sonic territory -- traditional Japanese percussion instruments like the taiko and Hyōshigi and west African percussion — a nod to the Afro-Japanese, feudal yet futuristic world Yasuke inhabits.

This album is a limited edition on red coloured vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, OBI strip and download code, pressed in the UK via Warp Records.