Following the death of Ras G last week at age 40, Flying Lotus joined Gilles Peterson on his BBC Radio 6 Music show Sunday and shared a few words about the experimental producer. Lotus also played an ominous new track, titled “Black Heaven,” which came about from their final time working together in Los Angeles.
The 35-year-old recalled going over to Ras G’s home studio to pitch him an idea about a movie he’d been thinking about creating. “The last time I saw G was really special to me, and there was something about the timing I just felt was really urgent to go see him,” Lotus said. “So, I went to go see him and I told him a bunch about this idea that I had, and he started kicking over some cool ideas, and we started just going back and forth about it. It was really, really cool. He even gave me the title for it, in the end, called Black Heaven.”
That very night, they crafted the spacey “Black Heaven” together. “We started messing around with some music, and I pulled out my little keyboard from my backpack and I just started playing some stuff and told him to record it,” he remembered of making the wordless track. “And he was saying, ‘We don’t even need to record no drums. You just play that stuff. It sounds like movie scenes. It sounds like scenes in your mind. What does this scene sound like to you?’ I just kept playing, and then he started recording. The next day, he sent me something back, and it was titled ‘Black Heaven.'”
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Listen to “Black Heaven” below.