Lotic - Agitations

Pitchfork 82

The 30-minute mixtape Agitations finds producer Lotic (aka J'Kerian Morgan) at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. "Agitations was born out of the frustrations that come with touring... and feeling increasingly out of touch with club culture and with the music industry in general," Morgan said in preface to his latest release. Accordingly, the music distances itself from the cyclical payoffs and rhythmic underpinnings of the dance floor. This is miles away from anything that could be considered "club culture." There’s something acutely alien about the tracks Morgan constructs, as if the producer is dealing in a musical language that's yet to fully emerge.

Throughout Agitations, Lotic's signature spidery sound design is subjected to further mangling via a series of violent jump-cuts and jarring bursts of noise. The arrangements treat sounds and themes like raw materials in need of repurposing: Each unit is contorted, smashed, and remade, either splintering into abstraction or writhing in glitchy tumult. Yet, for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, Agitations, much like 2014's Damsel in Distress and this year’s Heterocetera EP, again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer. On Heterocetera, Lotic sampled the ballroom standard "The Ha Dance" by Masters at Work, reshaping it radically, and he alludes to this same sample again here in the opening moments of "Carried". This version sounds pared-down and pixelated, a mutation of a mutation, and it's a microcosm of Agitations' tendency to tease out strange turns in familiar currencies.

Agitations might not be conventional dance music, but it remains both fiercely visceral and highly visual. It lacks Damsel in Distress' mastery of cultural memory, and Heterocetera's propulsive push-and-pull, but more than makes up for it in raw dynamism; a dogged, thrilling futurism hinged on brute energy, angularity, and unremitting disquiet. Moving in dense, unstable clusters, the mixtape can be taken as a celebration of frustration, liberation, and chaos, a means for Morgan to work through the restlessness and anxiety he's faced of late. For an artist who's consistently latched onto and forged a style as imaginative as any in the electronic underground, Agitations shows Lotic pushing still further ahead.