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The hyper-chromatic music of Matt Cutler marks him out as a true impressionist; as Lone, he drizzles brightly colored melody through his tracks with all the reflexive skill of a master painter daubing inks and pigment across paper. On Cutler’s fifth Lone album, Reality Testing, released on R&S, he sends notes and chords rippling delicately into space before allowing them to disperse, each oozing beautifully away into the background fabric of the music. Combined with rhythms that ebb and flow, shifting from propulsive club constructions to beatific coastal hip-hop, it’s a sensuous, immersive, heady experience, and easily his most accomplished and self-contained work to date.
“I was listening to a lot of Detroit techno and old Chicago house that had the same grain and dirtiness to it as a lot of the hip-hop I was listening to,” says Cutler of the genesis for Reality Testing. “That was the real spark – I wanted to make an album that had both hip-hop and house beats, but that weren’t completely different from each other, that shared the same sort of vibe.I love the idea of two things sat side by side, but instead of it seeming like they’re complete opposites, [it’s more that] those two things could almost be the same thing.”
Indeed, Reality Testing is unique among Lone’s work to date in its feeling of complete unification. Throughout, he draws upon the many loves and inspirations he’s previously explored in his own music – house, techno and instrumental hip-hop – but weaves them together into an inseparable whole. On advance single “Airglow Fires,” a rough-shod groove is set upon by dazzling chord blushes, melding rave’s serotonin tingle with an altogether softer and more intimate atmosphere. The kinked momentum of “Aurora Northern Quarter” nods equally to London broken beat, soul, and Detroit’s tradition of collage-esque deep house and hip hop. At other times, meanwhile, the music’s recombinant nature is yet more overt: as “Airglow Fires” ends, its house groove gives way to a teasingly brief, glittery hip-hop coda, while centerpiece “Coincidence” morphs midway from woozy shuffle to bright-eyed gallop.
Cutler’s prolific output as Lone to date has portrayed a restlessly creative mind, always searching for new pathways along which to take his sound. In his early years, he remembers, his work rate was relentless: “literally every day [I’d be] working on music, doing tracks really quickly, just trying to capture a mood and a vibe.” Indeed, Lone’s music, with its melodic warmth and emotional expressiveness, has long felt like a portal into Cutler’s subconscious – each individual track, like a sketchbook, seems to enshrine a particular mood at the moment it’s written. As time has gone on, Cutler has, “become better at capturing that,” he says, “and then leaving it for awhile, really taking the time to explore it and make the most of it, make [the track] a clearer picture.”
So Reality Testing is, on one level, a more considered Lone record; his sound is more gracefully integrated than ever before, the emotions and energy more sharply crystallized: its club-centered tracks hit harder, its stranger moments feel still woozier, and its moments of outright beauty are yet more fleetingly exquisite. Yet it remains characteristically a Lone record, possessed of that compellingly impulsive personality and multi-faceted nature – even its lightest-hearted moments are laced with a deliciously trippy, near-psychotic edge – that has always made his work deeply rewarding. “I see it as like a diary, really, a real document of the last year of making it,” Cutler reflects. “In a lot of the tracks there’s sounds I’ve sampled and recorded of me just being in the studio, and leaving the microphone running – you’re almost in there with me. I wanted it to be a representation of the different moods and emotions that went into making it – just as real and honest as possible.”
“10/10…Really there’s no one else doing it quite like Matt Cutler at the minute.” – DJ Mag
“His amalgams of house, rave, techno and hip-hop are rich with detail, and he slams them home with melodies that glow in the dark, as if he’s soundtracking films shot with color palettes our eyes can’t process yet.” – Pitchfork
“It’s almost inhumanly perfect…it shows him settling into a state of deep contentment, evoking the same warm and fuzzy feeling you get from throwing on a record that you know inside and out.” – Resident Advisor
“But there’s no question that this is one of our best artists on the form of his life.” – Mixmag
Lone
Reality Testing
R&S Records
June 17, 2014
LP / CD / Digital
Track List:
1. First Born Seconds
2. Restless City
3. Meeker Warm Energy
4. Aurora Northern Quarter
5. 2 is 8
6. Airglow Fires
7. Coincidences
8. Begin To Begin
9. Jaded
10. Vengeance Video
11. Stuck
12. Cutched Under
