Houston-born, Berlin-dwelling electronic experimentalist Lotic describes this debut album, which was made sporadically over a period of two years, following a host of mixtapes and EPs since 2011, as “an expansive exploration of the many ways in which power can be expressed and experienced”. And you can feel that power trickle and swell throughout.
You can sense the power of physical movement, most vigorously in the title track, which splices drum beats with something halfway between a video game glitch and a thrash metal sample, plus zings of sound zipping past your head. You also feel it in the power struggle on the playful, creeping Fragility, which teases with warm, disparate chord progressions, cut off before you can find a beat. The sparse, aptly named Love and Light gently sets the listener up to receive the more obviously power-rich tracks such as Hunted, a bass-driven R&B-style track that pairs whispers about “brown skin” with looped wails.
This is a club record that sits between hyperactive techno, industrial R&B and electronics, but every attempt to label it will fall flat. It’s a thrilling conundrum: every listener will find their own psychic path through the drills and buzzsaws on tracks such as Bulletproof.
Perhaps that’s why the most satisfying moment is the introduction of a grounding vocal on Nerve: a drawling accusation to anyone who has the cheek to ask someone where they’re from. “You got nerve,” they repeat, atop a pounding thud that requires little else: they’ve said it all.
This is a clanging, disruptive splatter of a debut, which speaks to the frustration of otherness through sheer feeling, rather than easily digestible vocals. Lotic’s gender identity and blackness don’t need to be explained in paint-by-numbers lyrics; the industrial pounding of The Warp and the Weft, a minute and a half of transcendent aural discomfort, does it for them.
