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My ado­ra­tion for Beach House’s Teen Dream was some­thing that hap­pened slowly, grad­u­ally, and organ­i­cally. Given the tones and the themes of the music, that seems appro­pri­ate. Like­wise, it seems appro­pri­ate that my love for Cos­mo­gramma, by Fly­ing Lotus, was more like flip­ping a switch. There were some sim­i­lar­i­ties — I liked and appre­ci­ated both albums from the first lis­tens, and there was some­thing “nat­ural” about both — but there were processes, much like in rela­tion­ships, and those were very dif­fer­ent. It was as if I got to know Teen Dream slowly, then looked back and saw what we’d been through. But I can tell you, it was the mid­dle of the after­noon on Sep­tem­ber 2, 2010 when I fell in love with Cos­mo­gramma.

Con­text is not every­thing. It is always some­thing, and, usu­ally, it is a whole heck of a lot. But if con­text were every­thing, then a broad gen­er­al­ity like “con­text is every­thing” would be laugh­ably fool­ish. But I digress. Con­text is not every­thing, but it is some­thing, and the con­text in which I “fell in love with” Cos­mo­gramma is worth think­ing about. I was dri­ving across the state of Wash­ing­ton for the first time. It was still sum­mer, but the air was crisp, and the top was down (I’m not stylin’ on y’all, it’s a Pon­tiac). I had a loaded iPod and satel­lite radio, but noth­ing had been doing it for me. Cos­mo­gramma may have been an odd choice, hav­ing already dri­ven a cou­ple hours through what was mostly farm­lands, en route to “the home of grunge and Sir Mix-a-Lot,” with a Pave­ment show the fea­tured item on my semi-full itin­er­ary. But it was one of those 2010 albums I’d liked-but-hadn’t-listened-to-much, and I wasn’t really into mak­ing a labo­ri­ous kind of decision.

When the album started, I was still in farm-territory, but dis­persed with some hills. I turned the music up to just barely too loud. Soon, it was as if a switch had been flipped, not only with regard to my feel­ings for Cos­mo­gramma, but in my sur­round­ings. I guess I had offi­cially left cen­tral Wash­ing­ton and arrived in west­ern Wash­ing­ton. By the time“Mmmhmm” started play­ing, I was sur­rounded. Every­thing around me was thick and lush and invit­ingly wild, the air, the trees, the moun­tains, and the music. It didn’t nec­es­sar­ily strike me as the per­fect sound­track — surely it was an occa­sion for The Microphones/Mount Eerie, I thought — but it felt so right, and, any­way, it was intox­i­cat­ing to the point that inten­tional sound­track­ing seemed like a tri­fling, stu­pid thing.

I expect that enter­ing heaven, how­ever that works, will feel a lot like that felt, like dri­ving into the beauty of west­ern Wash­ing­ton — surely one of the most beau­ti­ful places I’ve ever been — with Cos­mo­gramma — surely one of the coolest albums ever — play­ing just barely too loud.

But con­text isn’t every­thing. It might be true that any­thing could’ve sounded beau­ti­ful to me in that moment (I doubt it, but for the sake of argu­ment, okay, it’s a pos­si­bil­ity). If that is true, it stands to rea­son that Cos­mo­gramma would either dis­ap­point me now (as in, “I remem­ber this being bet­ter”), or I would only appre­ci­ate inso­far as it can evoke mem­o­ries of that moment. It nei­ther dis­ap­points, nor evokes mem­o­ries. In fact, hav­ing lis­tened to the album sev­eral times since then, I’ve begun to won­der if west­ern Wash­ing­ton was really as beau­ti­ful as it seemed. When I lis­ten to it, the con­text glis­tens, what­ever the con­text may be.

The buzzing around my office dur­ing a slow shift, the tin­ni­ness of an out­dated computer’s sole speaker, and the cru­elty of flu­o­res­cent light­ing are all spin­ning together in Fly­ing Lotus’s swirls to bring sur­re­al­ity to a mun­dane moment. A pre-/post-apocalyptic feel is inserted into a late night in early Decem­ber, illu­mi­nat­ing the layer of snow that has fallen, melted just a lit­tle, and frozen into a lumpy, crunchy slab of some­thing unfa­mil­iar from fence to fence in my backyard.

I’m a non-user, but I have a slight fas­ci­na­tion with drugs and drug-culture, and what Cos­mo­gramma does for me reminds me of the way users talk about LSD and Ecstasy. I can put it in terms that are more ratio­nal and true to my own expe­ri­ence. Cos­mo­gramma is evoca­tive, not so much of mem­ory, but of the senses. As back­ground music, the album is good, just fine, but when­ever I allow myself to be fully immersed in it, it becomes an invi­ta­tion to sen­sual full­ness. It is music that sounds like spirit incar­nate, like the human expe­ri­ence, itself. Pos­si­bly, Fly­ing Lotus achieves this by blend­ing organic jazz with spacey elec­tron­ics, which sounds like a sim­ple for­mula. For that mat­ter, maybe it sounds like a sim­ple for­mula to say that God breathed the breath of life into a pile of dirt.