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Feast Your Eyes on Flying Lotus’ Layer 3 Visuals [Pictures]

March 24, 2014 By Sebastian Aguirre

If you belong to the lucky few who got to see Flying Lotus while touring in the past year, you probably experienced the Layer 3. It is the brainchild of Flying Lotus, Strangeloop, and Timeboy. Strangeloop and Flylo go way back to college where they both attended The Academy of Art University in San Francisco. They went their separate ways until Brainfeeder, Flying Lotus’ label, started up at which point they joined forces again to work on audio-visual creations. Timeboy rounds out the trio, and works with Strangeloop on the visuals.

The Layer 3 setup is unique to the live electronic music scene. It consists of: a front, transparent scrim, a middle “layer” where Flylo stands, and the back panel where lights and visuals are also projected. All visuals are improvised, nothing is pre-programmed in an effort to maintain the live aspect of the show. Strangeboy explains the idea of the screens saying, “Hopefully the front screen looks more like something emanating from what he’s doing” and Timeboy explains the back screen as, “the universe we’re trying to take you through.”

These ideas merge flawlessly with Flying Lotus’ futuristic hip-hop sound. His music seems like something from the future, and the trio quote 2001: A Space Odyssey as an inspiration for their work. This vision and setup remind me a lot of Bassnectar’s Immersive Tour. Nectar said his vision for the Immersive Tour was, “to create the ideal atmosphere for people to lose themselves in the depths of music, like a journey into another world“. This resonates for me with what Flying Lotus is trying to accomplish with his live show, and he has succeeded in my opinion.

What’s next for the trio? They were just in Austin for SXSW where they performed with the Layer 3, and are now laying low until a European tour starting at the end of May. They will be in Europe for a few weeks until they return to play Red Rocks in June (I can only dream of what that setup will look like at Red Rocks). They will be at Electric Forest at the end of June, and Flylo confirmed on twitter that the Layer 3 will be making an appearance in the Forest. I will be there and this is a set that I refuse to miss. Check the high quality video of his performance at Hard Summer last August to get a better feel of the scale and quality of his performance.