While Steven Ellison has done his best to carve his own space outside of his family tree, the LA producer opened his 2010 LP with a track that seemed like a natural successor to the spiritual jazz of his Great Aunt Alice Coltrane. And it’s the way he melds those ethereal harps with heavy electronic beats creating multi-layered orchestrations that marks him out as one of the most exciting producers out of the West Coast scene. On release Ellison dubbed the LP a ‘Space Opera’ connecting with the Afro-futurists whose path he walks in so assuredly on the mangled jazz of ‘Nose Art’, ‘Recoiled’, and the wonderfully entitled ‘Zodiac Shit’ and ‘German Haircut’. Elsewhere, Ellision offers an otherworldly vocal track ‘And the World Laughs With You’ featuring Thom Yorke and the Sa Ra style abstractions of ‘Do the Astral Plane’, but it’s on the jazz lick that he really reaches the higher ground. An abstract cosmic jazz classic.