The Netflix anime series Yasuke was inspired by (and elaborately fabulized) the underdocumented life of real-world African-born retainer of 16th century feudal lord Oda Nobunaga. The fact that Flying Lotus co-wrote the story — taking the titular character and his underdocumented life past Nobunaga’s suicide, expanding it into a supernaturally-inflected ultra-shonen clusterbomb of anachronistic magical realism — only makes it that much more noteworthy that his score outdoes the actual script for evoking a sense of cross-cultural wonder. FlyLo geeks out a bit in his musical acknowledgements: we get glimmering little moments on “Mind Flight” and “Fighting Without Honor” that nod to Vangelis’s work on the Yamaha CS-80, the crystalline wistfulness of “Pain and Blood” sounding like a refraction of Disasterpiece’s video game scores, and “War Lords” providing the best otaku-friendly riff off Pink Floyd’s “On the Run” since the Pierrot le Fou episode of Cowboy Bebop. But FlyLo’s characteristic convergence of the instinctively ancient and the unfamiliar futurist threads of beat-driven synth music is his vision first and foremost, and you don’t need to watch the series to be immersed in this score’s intricate balance of martial, action-propelled intensity and reflective, graceful warmth.