Until the Quiet Comes is the fourth studio album by American electronic music producer Flying Lotus, released on September 26, 2012 by Warp Records. Flying Lotus was inspired to create the album by psychedelic music, African percussion, and concepts of the human subconscious and dream world. He recorded for two years at his home in Los Angeles, experimenting with different mixing techniques and dynamics while primarily using an Ableton Live sequencer along with other instruments and software. The producer was accompanied on certain songs by guest vocalists, including Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, and Laura Darlington. The album also continued his creative partnership with bassist Thundercat, who had appeared on Flying Lotus' 2010 record Cosmogramma.
An electronic jazz album, Until the Quiet Comes features free jazz elements, varying musical tones, contrasting scales, and shifts in rhythmic feel. Its songs are sequenced together and characterized by what music journalists noted to be ghostly vocal production, irregular drum beats, pulsating percussive textures, trembling basslines, trilled synthesizers, and fluctuating samples. The album has a journey-like concept and dreamy musical narrative, which Flying Lotus conceived while imagining himself in the process of astral projection. He later said the album could be interpreted uniquely by listeners; it has been interpreted by writers as a musical accompaniment to dreams and a process of emotional introspection by the producer.
Until the Quiet Comes was marketed with two singles and a short film featuring music from the album. Flying Lotus also promoted the album with an international concert tour from October to November 2012, performing at venues in North America and abroad. The album debuted at number 34 on the Billboard 200 and sold 13,000 copies in its first week of release. It was a widespread critical success, receiving praise for its complex music and Flying Lotus' sound engineering.
Background
In 2010, Flying Lotus released his third album Cosmogramma to critical acclaim and mainstream exposure. He recorded the album while grieving his mother's death, and titled it as a reference to his late great-aunt Alice Coltrane. The album showcased his dense, loose mix of electronic and live instrumentation with avant-garde jazz, dance, and hip-hop influences. During its recording, he developed a creative relationship with contributing bassist Thundercat, a member of his Brainfeeder record label. They continued working together on Flying Lotus' 2010 EP Pattern+Grid World, which continued the dense electronic style of Cosmogramma. They developed more musical ideas together, from which Flying Lotus culled and produced for Thundercat's debut album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011.
For Until the Quiet Comes, Flying Lotus was inspired by African percussion music and psychedelic bands such as Silver Apples, Can, Stereolab, Portishead, and Gentle Giant. He also returned to listening to the music of his relatives Alice and John Coltrane after listening excessively to austere electronica while recording Cosmogramma. Musically, he wanted to avoid repeating himself and chose a more minimal direction for the album, seeking to eschew the "strange sense of urgency" of Cosmogrammas music for "tension and release". He elaborated on his direction for the album in an interview for The National, saying that "I think I'd have been in a bad position if I tried to recreate the same energy as I did on Cosmogramma – like, go in further. How about we pull back, try to do something that gets to the core of the emotional sentiment. Not so grand, more intimate. But still have the core of what it is."
Conceptually, Flying Lotus pursued human-subconscious and dream world themes. He sought to tone down Cosmogrammas grandiose, universal concept and create a timeless, journey-like work with Until the Quiet Comes, from which he felt listeners could interpret their own stories. He imagined himself astral projecting when conceiving the album and tried to translate ideas from fiction he had read into music, including holographic universes, metaphysics, New Age philosophy, and astrodynamics. In conceiving a narrative for the album, he drew on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey literary theory to introduce a world, characters, and situations musically. He characterized the album as both "a collage of mystical states, dreams, sleep and lullabies", and "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to". He clarified the idea in an interview for Spin as "that whole experience of being innocent in this new world that you don't really understand. I imagined Little Nemo on a flying bed floating over the city, and this is the soundtrack to it." Flying Lotus felt more confident in his ideas and as a recording artist after striving to distinguish himself from his contemporaries on previous albums.
Recording and production
Flying Lotus started working on Until the Quiet Comes at his home in Mount Washington, Los Angeles, which featured more acoustic space than his previous residence in Echo Park. He recorded the album for two years, using a spacious room there as a recording studio. He revisited scrapped ideas from the sessions for Thundercat's debut album and revised their direction for Until the Quiet Comes. The song "Hunger" developed from a demo he had recorded for the soundtrack to one of the Twilight films, and "Sultan's Request" was performed live by Flying Lotus for three years before the album. For "Electric Candyman", he used a beat he had prepared for sessions that ultimately fell through with Burial, and he used a five-year-old recording with Samiyam for the second half of "The Nightcaller".
Flying Lotus recorded Until the Quiet Comes in a three-part process—first composing rough drafts for songs, then refining them for several months with additional instrumentation to make them substantial, and finally mixing the songs for a cohesive album. Unlike with his previous work, he concentrated on his music's dynamics rather than just its production when working on the album. Interested in music theory and arrangements, he started taking piano lessons at the beginning of the album's recording to learn more chords and progressions. Rather than emphasize conventional song structure elements such as hooks and choruses, Flying Lotus composed instrumentals that he found to be more intellectual and less danceable than Cosmogramma and treated them as the basis of tracks when recording the album. He also recorded melodic refrains to evoke feelings of childlike innocence on songs.
Flying Lotus worked primarily with an Ableton Live music sequencer through his MacBook Pro laptop. At his home studio, he had upgraded monitors acquired from after his move there, and various digital and analog instruments, including a drum kit, a Fender Rhodes piano, Wurlitzer electric pianos, Access Virus and Minimoog Voyager synthesizers, a drum machine, three Mac Powerbooks, and a DSP unit. He played drums without quantizing them and referred to the personal library of samples he had amassed over his career while producing the album. He recorded the song "Dream to Me" the day after purchasing a microKORG synthesizer. He ultimately recorded over 60 songs for the album before editing them down.
To attain certain dynamics on songs, Flying Lotus studied different mixing techniques and switched software midway through the album's recording. He later cited the switch as the reason for the album's completion being overdue, although he felt that it was productive to challenge himself as a student of music. Flying Lotus employed a trial and error approach to mixing and applied his new knowledge of compression to attain a more satisfactory result before the album's master. He also sought to limit distracting frequencies and segues in favor of more important sounds throughout the album. To make certain sounds more affecting, he used the side-chain compression technique to trigger compression of different organ, strings, and bass sounds upon a drum kick on a song. He said of his production and the music's dynamic range in an interview for Electronic Musician, "I've been learning to bring things down before I even start. I'll start composing a track at like −8dB, then I have all this headroom to play with afterward. I've learned how to tuck and limit things, learned to EQ before you limit."
As with his previous releases, Until the Quiet Comes was mastered by engineer Daddy Kev at his Echo Chamber Studio in Eagle Rock. He used a Pro Tools 9 workstation and various EQ plug-ins on his Mac Pro, while working at a 24-bit, 96 kHz audio quality to comply with iTunes' "Mastered for iTunes" regulations. To preserve the tracks' original dynamics, Daddy Kev used a signal chain that processed both digital and analog signals. He found the mastering process to be "very intimate" and likened it to "giving birth" for Flying Lotus, saying in an interview, "We may go through multiple mixes so a certain 808 can sit right in the pocket for him, and while he's finishing his edits its my job to boost just the right things by a decibel or two, and keep things sonically correct." He used both professional and club-oriented amplifiers and monitors to minimize harmonic distortion and maintain Flying Lotus' minimalist aesthetic, which, along with his need to find a quiet mental space, inspired the album's title: "I wanted to set people up to this idea, before they even heard it, that the quiet was a key word in the whole thing ... [A] part of pulling it back is some kind of growing up."
Collaborations Flying Lotus collaborated with other musicians for additional elements on songs. He worked with instrumentalist and musical director Miguel Atwood Ferguson to incorporate strings arrangements to songs. Thundercat played live bass on nine of the album's songs. To develop basslines for songs, Flying Lotus had Thundercat's bass plugged into a DI unit of a FireWire interface as he improvised riffs to Flying Lotus' suggestions. Flying Lotus captured flat-levelled bass ideas into the interface, which allowed him to manipulate their tone and integrate them with digital instruments and samples on songs. He attributes the continuity of the album's music to Thundercat's bass playing. For certain tracks on the album, Flying Lotus wanted to use vocalists that would "see their sound as texture as opposed to the song", and said of this preference in an interview for Vibe, "Sometimes singers overdo it so that you only focus on the voice, which is cool sometimes, but it's my record – I'm producing it – so the songs should be about the track as a whole. The people that are my favorites are ones who have such a respect for what's already there. They don't try to approach it thinking they're going to turn it into a song, but rather going to add to it."
Flying Lotus enlisted other vocalists, including Thom Yorke on "Electric Candyman", Laura Darlington on "Phantasm", Erykah Badu on "See Thru to U", and Thundercat on "DMT Song". Yorke wanted to be involved with the album after collaborating on "...And the World Laughs with You" for Cosmogramma, and exchanged his vocals via email. Flying Lotus admired him for knowing "when things work and [when] they don't. He doesn't bullshit in that way. He spends his time wisely. I wish I could say that about a lot more people." He met Badu through Thundercat, who had played in her backing band and collaborated with her on The Golden Age of Apocalypse, and started working on her own upcoming album while recording Until the Quiet Comes. Flying Lotus also planned to work with Jonny Greenwood, but the collaboration fell through. Instead, he appropriated music from one of Greenwood's film soundtracks for the song "Hunger", for which Greenwood is credited as composer.
Music