Over the years, there has sometimes been an awkward disconnect between the mystic presence of Flying Lotus on his records and the reality of Steven Ellison, the man behind it all, trying to translate that into an energetic live show. I saw him in mid-2012, and he had a hype man onstage, which simply didn’t match the mood at all. I saw him sometime within a year after that, and he had a giant screen and armor or something, but would come out from behind the screen and talk, another thing that kind of disrupted the vibe he’d so carefully curated. Last night was the first time I’d seen FlyLo since last year’s excellent You’re Dead!, and the man has arrived at a perfect synthesis of everything he’s about. He plays in front of one screen and behind another, psychedelic imagery overlaid between the two, often to transfixing effect. At one point it all dropped out to a static-y grey, with FlyLo visible as a black silhouette in a glowing mask, before tendrils rose up from the bottom of the screen to subsume him. Later, imagery that looked like a sun exploding in black and white played alongside one of the spacier tracks of the night. Not only is this stuff perfectly fitting for the music, a lot of it is straight-up gorgeous. Like, to the point that during the more ethereal music and more oblique imagery, you almost felt like you could be watching an art installation.

That’s the key to FlyLo’s new live performance: he’s found a way to effortlessly switch between that and the party, to play a ninety-minute set that jumps from galactic, psychedelic shit to more straightforward dance music to rap, back to galactic, psychedelic shit, back to rap, etc., etc. Occasionally, the name “Flying Lotus” appeared on the screen in a kind of ’80s anime font, Ellison might say a few words, and it worked as a reset button before the next passage of the show. He dropped “Collard Greens,” he played an amazing beat that he said he made for Nas (“I’m waiting for him to spit, though”); he played a bunch of his best space-age stuff, and a bunch of other space-age stuff I didn’t recognize at all. A security guard stood in the front of the stage, thrashing and dancing around on his own, directing the crowd, and then dancing with Chance The Rapper and other FlyLo friends. It was an experience that was transcendent and fun at the same time; it was everything. The only frustrating thing is wanting to know all the cool shit he plays.