The primary time I heard Luci4, I wasn’t certain if it was a person, girl, Vocaloid, or some gremlin who plucked a broken laptop computer from lost-and-found purgatory. “All Eyez On Me” took the sped-up edit model of nightcore, a remix style I’d been obsessive about for ages, as its place to begin. Throughout 84 seconds of stuttery-gurgly indignation, he squeals about getting head and compares his haters to ticks and fleas (actually, he’s the one who sounds as shrill as an insect). The feedback on YouTube lyric movies have been full of individuals like, Wait he says precise phrases? Rattling.
This was in the course of the first 12 months of COVID, when a technology of youngsters have been locked inside and rotting on Discord VCs. I had fallen down a chasm on SoundCloud and located my option to Luci4’s web page. His occult ritual craziness jogged my memory of the fun I felt discovering cloud rap almost a decade prior. Over the subsequent few years, the underground would slowly warp itself in his phantasmal picture.
Luci4—who died on February 22 on the age of 23—made at occasions astonishingly bizarre music. However his journey to producing wasn’t tremendous far off from different mortal beings. He instructed the weblog 108 Mics that he began making drill beats as a tween after getting his first laptop computer for Christmas and cracking FL Studio. Earlier than he made a reputation for himself as a solo artist, he obtained consideration as a teen when Tay-Ok jacked one in all his beats off YouTube for his 2017 observe “Gotta Blast.”
Although he was based mostly in California, Luci4—who additionally glided by 4jay and Axxturel at factors—descended from Memphis horrorcore and SpaceGhostPurrp’s shadowy pressure of Florida rap, and was a member of SGP’s collective Black Cash Boyz Deathrow. Finally he fashioned his personal, Jewelxxet. The Gothic alchemy of Luci4’s music minimize throughout picture and textual content: There have been the kitschy fantasy sprites of the duvet artwork, culled from the defunct GIF web site Blingee, and the cryptic titles that RYM heads teamed as much as decode. His standout 2020 tape Noktifer’s Symphony was the work of a prince banished from society, hiding away in a frayed palace whose degraded partitions echoed with bass thuds and threats. The music appeared to obey no legal guidelines of tune construction, tunefulness, normal relativity, or something conceived by puny people. Tracks sputtered and rang out with rah-rah rattlesnake sibilance. Their alien rhythms and waterlogged chants mirrored a deep hatred for pop manufacturing and the mainstream. He was a tinny hint of an MC, a sliver of megabytes banging contained in the glass of the display. Generally the fun got here from the way in which he dissolved luscious samples into hyperspeed haze, like summery Florida quick anthems compressed and dessicated.
When Luci4 got here up across the flip of the 2020s, the net underground was splintering each which method, from wailing digicore to bitcrushed hexD. Alongside a choose few teams like Reptilian Membership Boyz and Flexxcult, Jewelxxet grew to become the nexus for a brand new vanguard of dudes hooked on Trueys, distortion, and blood emojis. The misanthropic music matched the grim unreality of the delinquent pandemic world. Each member unleashed their very own mayhem: sellasouls’ anti-ASMR nightmarish hissing and MajinBlxxdy’s monstrous growls, Bacleo’s bolts of eerie electrical energy and nd the heavenly susurrations of prostiiitutiiion.
