Flying Lotus on His Favorite Horror Movie and Video Game Composers

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.

John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog, They Live)

Flying Lotus: I was really just vibing with John Carpenter as a human and a spirit. I was watching the original Halloween a lot when I was making this movie. I was obsessed with it. I even lifted a shot right out of that movie with no shame. But the thing that I really vibed on was just the fact that when he did that movie, he was kind of up against the wall. He didn't have hella people with him. He didn't have a composer. He had some synthesizers and no time at all. And that's what it felt like for me working on this. I was doing it in New Zealand, and I wasn't in my studio, and didn't have my musicians that I like to work with. So it was like, What can I do alone with minimal gear, and just build a palette around that? And that was really the foundation.

Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill games)

Akira Yamaoka is all in this. He's an unsung hero. People owe so much to his influence in the sound and worlds of Silent Hill. Without the music in that atmosphere, it can be a pretty hollow game. He uses a very minimal approach to invoke that feeling of isolation and the beautiful melancholy where you just want to walk through the fog and the sun never comes out. I love that about his music. 

I don't know if this is too early to say, but we are signing Akira Yamaoka to Brainfeeder. We got the man himself coming out with an album very soon. It’s completely unrelated to Silent Hill, but the fans will know what it is. I'll say that as a fan, I'm geeking over the album. I'm like, Dude, that's the guy right there. 

Cliff Martinez (Solaris, Contagion, Drive)

The score he did for Solaris was really cool. It was a sci-fi film that needed a sound that was expressive yet minimal. You have two characters, so you can't have a huge sound. This has to be intimate. He used electronics, and found something that was beautiful and hypnotic. I loved it, and I listened to it a lot to fall asleep to.

Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks) and Vangelis (Blade Runner)

Angelo Badalamenti and Vangelis would both watch the picture and improvise based on what they were feeling in the scene. The cool thing about being part of the edit of a movie, as a composer, is that you know it so well that when it's time to do the music, you know exactly what feelings you're trying to get across. So it was nice to just put the movie on and play—like, play the feelings, playing what they’re saying. And I think that was what Angelo and Vangelis did. It's improvised. You don't know what you did while you're doing it, but you listen back, and you're like, Well, that's what the scene feels like, and it just works.