The evolution of incorporation of electronica into the craft of singer-songwriters has been oddly faltering over the years. It’s quarter of a century since Björk set the pace, and yet the landscape is still dominated by a very few individualist auteurs: James Blake, Thom Yorke, Frank Ocean. Just lately, though, a new generation has added to the talent pool, emerging from the high definition, ultra-detailed area of electronic music broadly known as “deconstructed club”.

We’ve already remarked on how this has impacted on the pop world in the form of the still explosive “hyperpop” movement. But deconstructed club is increasingly creating performers who stand apart from normal musical categories of pop, alternative, urban, club and the like, but to a greater or lesser extent have songwriting woven into what they do. The Venezuelan musician Arca and American multimedia artist Oneohtrix Point Never have created some of the defining sounds of the past decade by incorporating voices and/or song structures into extremely abstracted electronics – each impacting the mainstream by working with artists like Kanye West and The Weeknd. More recently, 33EMYBW and Howie Lee from China, Proc Fiskal from Scotland, Lila Tirando A Violeta from Uruguay, Lighght from Ireland, Prettybwoy from Japan and Angel-Ho from South Africa have each created unique twists on this abstract musicality.

Other than Arca, though, few have centred performance quite as much as the remarkable Texan in Berlin, J’Kerian Morgan, aka Lotic. As part of the Janus collective, Lotic helped establish deconstructed club sounds as a vital part of Berlin’s, and global underground vocabulary in the early to mid-2010s. Her electronic production was advanced enough that she was employed by music tech company Ableton, and caught the ear of Björk, who she supported and remixed in 2016. But there was much more than just sonic invention to her work: from the start it came with a striking visual aesthetic of strange, complex digital life forms – and through the second half of the 2010s, Lotic began to inhabit this work, her voice snaking through the electronics on 2018’s Power album, and her face increasingly centred in the artwork.

She takes a huge step further forward into the limelight on Water. The totality of this record is extraordinary, with song, sound and personality in sync to the point of inseparability. It makes for a fascinating comparison with our last featured album, Proc Fiskal’s Siren Spine Sysex. Just as that album took specific elements from Celtic traditional and popular music and underground electronic sounds, but used them in a way that was no longer referential to genre, so has Lotic built her own unique sonic vocabulary before transcending it.

As well as layered synths and chattering rhythms, her primary instruments are the harp, the 808 kickdrum (the vast heartbeat of 21^st century US hip-hop culture, which dominates and defines the song structures here) and her own voice, which occupies a space somewhere between avant-garde opera and the spiritual jazz of the 1970s. Her themes touch on Black history, queerness, transformation and yearning. That might all make this sound like heavy going, and sure, it’s not really a chillout record. In fact, much like Proc Fiskal’s album, Water gives a sense of a person locating themselves among the cascade of digital and cultural information around them, and thus guiding you, the listener, through it too.  

There’s a feeling of high cinematic drama throughout, bordering on the martial or apocalyptic – especially with the brass and string tones of “Come Unto Me” and “Always You” – but it’s always tempered with the intimacy of fine electronic detail, the ripples of the harp, and the cracks in Lotic’s voice. It’s elemental in scale, but exquisite in its detail. This perfectly intersects with the lyrical examinations of places where the personal and political fuse; where individual yearnings or struggles are expressions of vast historical waves, currents and undertows. Those flows pull you towards the future too. It would be tempting to say the fragility expressed here is very human, but really, like so much that’s come from the deconstructed club world, it hints at something posthuman – or at least a kind of humanity that is evolving to live in the everything-all-at-once data flows of the modern world.

Water is an intense listen, but it’s a very beautiful record too. It’s the sound of an artist shaking off any last constraints of the scene and sound she emerged from, while still being able to incorporate the individual techniques of her past work into the totality of her sound – and becoming something new altogether. Will it revolutionise what it means to be a singer-songwriter? Will it create a new kind of auteur role that inspires others to more and bigger achievements? Time alone will tell on that front – but there’s no question at all that it is a successful escape from category and marks the maturing of an artist that could only exist now, in 2021.

Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs.