An extraordinary musical movement has been bubbling over from the far left field into the public consciousness in the last couple of years. A very loose international alliance of musicians like Elysia Crampton, GAIKA, Ziúr, Arca, Rabit, Yves Tumor, and the NON Worldwide collective of Angel-Ho, Chino Amobi and Nkisi have been making sounds that unceremoniously strip experimental electronica of its straight white male trappings, and rebuilding it from first principles as something nonconformist in every sense, shot through with a strong sense of urgency and possibility.
J’Kerian Morgan aka Lotic, a Texan now resident in Berlin, is a leading light in this. His tracks have all the hallmarks of the rising sound: extremely high-definition production, in which every minuscule detail seems perceptible all at once; consistent interweaving of beauty and harshness, melody and ragged distortion; the sonics of modern hip hop and dancehall existing on a plane of consistency with abstracted noise and electronic psychedelia; and above all, a consistent sense of warped hedonism, in the sense not of dumb escapism but of a space outside the quotidian where non-standard minds and bodies can play and explore themselves.
"As a DJ,” they once said, “I want people to dance, but I also want them to be a little bit unsure of what's going on most of the time," and that is a very fair summation of what you can get from this, his second album. There is industrial bleakness underpinning detuned torch song crooning (“Solace”), car-engine grind hard dubstep wobbles (“Resilience”), piercing screeches over heavy metal drumming (“Power”). But as those song titles suggest, this is not about alienation and misery, but affirmation. And the sparkling melodies of “Love and Light” and “Fragility”, and the neck-snapping hip hop momentum of “Bulletproof” are full of the instant narcotic thrills of the best club music. This is hard music, but it is also radically pleasurable, and deserves to be heard very widely.
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