lotic album art

UT Alumna and Electronic Musician Lotic Makes Her Voice Heard from Berlin

  • Jan 1, 2022

Houston native Lotic was awed by the marching bands and drum lines of her youth, fueling her passion for music as a child, when she was still known as J’Kerian Morgan. While studying film at The University of Texas at Austin, she DJ’ed sets at local clubs and on KVRX, the student-run radio station. But it was at UT’s Experimental and Electronic Music Studios where she began to explore and develop her own sound.

“I did that for the last two years [in Austin], and I was like, I am a musician,” Lotic says. “This is what I want to do.”

Immediately after graduating from UT in 2012, Lotic moved to Berlin, a city long regarded as an international mecca for both LGBTQ+ culture and electronic music. Quickly, she found a community there and began releasing her own music. In 2014 she released Damsel in Distress, catching the attention of Björk, who asked Lotic to remix a track and open for her at a show in Berlin.

This collaboration brought Lotic a new fanbase, and in 2017, she released her first full-length album Power to critical acclaim. By this time, she had come out as trans and was expressing herself more authentically than ever before.

Her latest album Water, released in November, marks another milestone moment in Lotic’s artistic and personal growth. For earlier releases, she had been hesitant to use her own voice in her music, but in Water, her vocals float over electronic sounds, revealing personal and imaginative narratives.

“Over the years, I feel the music has gotten much more emotional, operatic and personal,” she says. “[The] vocals and storytelling have become much more prominent.”

Read the full story in The Alcalde.