Berlin-based producer Lotic's modus operandi is usually pretty ruthless: as he once told FADER, his dream nightclub would have "“a puddle of tears in one corner and a puddle of cum in another.” Often this translates in his deconstructed club music as a brutal meeting of pop ecstasy and churning industrial noise, as in his incredible Damsel In Distress mix in which the exposed skeleton of Beyoncé's "Drunk In Love" vocal wanders a post-apocalyptic landscape. But on "Headlock," dropped on his Soundcloud this morning, Lotic takes a subtler route to that pleasure-meets-pain headspace, building sci-fi melodies over a slow metallic rattle until it gradually becomes the closest thing to pretty he's ever done. It's kind of like seeing a rainbow reflected in the sheer glossy surface of a skyscraper: lush yet somehow alien. Lock in below.
