Last week, Cashmere Cat released an airy new track called "Adore", featuring Ariana Grande, that lifted some of the industrial clang and reverberation from the ballroom house anthem "The Ha Dance", by Masters at Work. It might be surprising to hear this piece of black, gay underground dance culture drift into Ariana Grande's sphere, but part of what draws major-label collaborators (Tinashe, Charli XCX and, now, Kanye West) into Cashmere Cat's orbit is his Tumblr-ready ear, which is where today’s aesthetic subcultures flourish.
"Ha" isn’t as immediately identifiable on the Cashmere Cat song as it is on Lotic’s "Heterocetera". On the title track from the Berlin-based producer/DJ, the source is more obvious (and maybe more expected, given that J’Kerian Morgan is black, gay and American) but also lovingly massaged, cajoled like Play-Doh, into something colorfully reverent. Lotic filets the iconic cascading modular synths, sending screaming wisps out onto the track before sinking slowly into a bubbling, steaming pit of sound. It’s pretty macabre except for a hollow dembow, which moves the scary story along at deceivingly pleasant pace.
Heterocetera might not be a happy recording, but that’s what makes the five-track collection so ambitious. This is Lotic’s third release in just over two years—his first for Tri Angle Records—and perhaps the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to clinical, after-hours techno. There are no overtures to pleasure, no simple hooks, entry points (save for the "Ha", if that does it for you) or clear parallels. The closest analogue to Lotic, at least energetically, might be fellow Texan Travi$ Scott, who makes a similar mess of genre—hip-hop, in Scott’s case—and also brings a gothic energy to club music.
So, imagine this: it's 4 a.m., and you're in a room lit by a single red light bulb in the corner, Lotic’s "Slay" lumbering to life on the system. There is no bassline anchoring the warm, atonal synth lines. Instead, patches of distortion rattle around the skeleton of the track, forming an indistinct textural scaffold of percussion. It sounds like something slowly moving closer to you, perhaps crying to itself. Suddenly, everything in the room—the sounds, the people, the red light—feel like they're closing in around you.
This is what Morgan does best: He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood. It's what so many other producers strive to do but can’t until they are far older than Morgan. A "Ha" sample might seem contrived to some, but he knows that, so he hacks away, letting its guts spill formlessly forth. His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil.
