Why We Picked This

Andrew Winistorfer: How did this one end up getting picked? It’s been on the drawing board for a while, right?

Alex Berenson, Senior A&R: I’ve actually wanted to do a Flying Lotus record since I started working here two-and-a-half years ago. I’m a huge fan of his, and Cosmogramma was the first album of his I ever heard. It hit me when I was probably the “coolest” I’ve ever been or will be; I was interning at Alpha Pup records with Daddy Kev, who mastered this album, and I was often going to Low End Theory (R.I.P.), that weekly show in L.A. where FlyLo, Thundercat, Nosaj Thing, all those beat scene guys got their start. Thom Yorke would come and play. James Blake would come and play. It felt like the epicenter of this huge scene that at the time not many people knew about; I didn’t know about it till I moved there. And this album just felt like this big masterpiece, this incredible album that captured what was happening in L.A. music then.

For sure. And as someone outside of L.A., it was that too. I was music blogging at the time, and I remember hearing some underground talk of Los Angeles, the album before this, but then Cosmogramma dropped and you weren’t shit if you didn’t seek that out and reckon with it. It’s a tough album, but it’s not like listening to free jazz or something. It’s this sweeping, “This is where music is going”-type album, and it felt like a no-brainer for us to do this.

Package Details

This one was half-speed remastered at Alchemy UK, and is on this really cool marbled black and white vinyl. 180 grams of course.

We really worked closely with FlyLo and his team, right? We even got them to do alternate album art.

Yeah, they went back and came up with this alternate artwork, and did all the printing on the inner sleeves, and in the gatefold. It’s a wild package.

Yeah, it reminds me of some huge codex thing you’re supposed to decode. It felt like I had the Stargate in my hands or something. And we can’t sleep on the half-speed remaster. This felt like our press of Panda Bear’s Person Pitch; it felt like I was uncovering new turns in this I’d never heard.

Totally. It’s a beautiful package for an amazing album. That’s what we do.