Lotic - Power

The Guardian 80

(Tri Angle)

Berlin-based electronic artist Lotic is from the school of fractured beat-makers like Arca, Sophie and Elysia Crampton who elude genre and gender boundaries – and whose blunt, mechanistic club creations are not for the faint of heart. According to Lotic, who prefers to use the pronoun “they”, their debut album is less abrasive than previous material, making the unlistenable danceable. Bulletproof’s toppling drums suggest a ninja running across rooftops, while The Warp and the Weft is the gnarliest attack of gabba since DJ Scotch Egg. Hunted, meanwhile, is an intriguing slice of ghostly gospel with sinister whispers of “brown skin, masculine frame/ head’s a target”.

It’s easy to hear why Björk is a fan: Lotic’s baroque shimmer-strings have a similar synthetically sweet quality to Arca’s co-production on her albums Vulnicura and Utopia. And like Vulnicura – as track titles such as Resilience, with its chainsaw-savage groove, and smoky ballad Solace suggest – this is an album about finding inner strength. The result is a fearless and powerful debut.

Pitchfork 78

The debut from the Berlin-based producer explores at the idea of power in the world and within themself, tiptoeing the line between exuberance and terror.

The Guardian 60

Tri-Angle

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.