Wayne »Lotek« Bennett

Lotek is a Jamaican-English born music producer and reggae/hiphop artist, who has contributed greatly to the sounds of Big Dada label artists including Lotek Hifi, Roots Manuva and the 2009 Mercury Award winning artist, Speech Debelle.

Taking influence from reggae, Lotek explores the evolution of hip hop by way of the Reggae Sound System culture. He looks to Jamaica for inspiration and takes pride in continuing the tradition of UK artists working with, and interpreting, the sounds of Jamaica.

We got to know Wayne back in the days when we were working for a college radio station. We put one of Lotek’s band’s releases in our charts, Wayne and Thomas from Lotek HiFi stumbled upon the charts on the web, and linked us. We then met in Switzerland at a Lotek HiFi gig before Wayne moved to Australia where he has since then continued to put out the outstanding kind of music we started to love when listening to Roots Manuva’s »Run Come Save Me« album and put Lotek HiFi’s »Perculator« 7inch on our record player for the very first times.