The first time I heard Luci4, I wasn’t sure if it was a man, woman, Vocaloid, or some gremlin who plucked a damaged laptop from lost-and-found purgatory. “All Eyez On Me” took the sped-up edit style of nightcore, a remix genre I’d been obsessed with for ages, as its starting point. Across 84 seconds of stuttery-gurgly indignation, he squeals about getting head and compares his haters to ticks and fleas (really, he’s the one who sounds as shrill as an insect). The comments on YouTube lyric videos were full of people like, Wait he says actual words? Damn.
This was during the first year of COVID, when a generation of kids were locked inside and rotting on Discord VCs. I had fallen down a chasm on SoundCloud and found my way to Luci4’s page. His occult ritual craziness reminded me of the thrill I felt discovering cloud rap nearly a decade prior. Over the next few years, the underground would slowly warp itself in his phantasmal image.
Luci4—who died on February 22 at the age of 23—made at times astonishingly weird music. But his journey to producing wasn’t super far off from other mortal beings. He told the blog 108 Mics that he started making drill beats as a tween after getting his first laptop for Christmas and cracking FL Studio. Before he made a name for himself as a solo artist, he received attention as a teenager when Tay-K jacked one of his beats off YouTube for his 2017 track “Gotta Blast.”
Though he was based in California, Luci4—who also went by 4jay and Axxturel at points—descended from Memphis horrorcore and SpaceGhostPurrp’s shadowy strain of Florida rap, and was a member of SGP’s collective Black Money Boyz Deathrow. Eventually he formed his own, Jewelxxet. The Gothic alchemy of Luci4’s music cut across image and text: There were the kitschy fantasy sprites of the cover art, culled from the defunct GIF website Blingee, and the cryptic titles that RYM heads teamed up to 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 walls echoed with bass thuds and threats. The music seemed to obey no laws of song structure, tunefulness, general relativity, or anything conceived by puny humans. Tracks sputtered and rang out with rah-rah rattlesnake sibilance. Their alien rhythms and waterlogged chants reflected a deep hatred for pop production and the mainstream. He was a tinny trace of an MC, a sliver of megabytes banging inside the glass of the screen. Sometimes the thrill came from the way he dissolved luscious samples into hyperspeed haze, like summery Florida fast anthems compressed and dessicated.
When Luci4 came up around the turn of the 2020s, the online underground was splintering every which way, from wailing digicore to bitcrushed hexD. Alongside a select few groups like Reptilian Club Boyz and Flexxcult, Jewelxxet became the nexus for a new vanguard of dudes addicted to Trueys, distortion, and blood emojis. The misanthropic music matched the bleak unreality of the antisocial pandemic world. Every member unleashed their own mayhem: sellasouls’ anti-ASMR nightmarish hissing and MajinBlxxdy’s monstrous growls, Bacleo’s bolts of eerie electricity and nd the heavenly susurrations of prostiiitutiiion.
