In 2009, UK bedroom producer Matt Cutler, who makes music as Lone, put out a record called Ecstasy & Friends that now sounds oddly prescient. Released on Actress' Werk Discs, the record contained a wide range of in-vogue sonic elements: humid Dilla-stepped beats, filmic vocal samples, and the beatific tape-warp wooziness of Boards of Canada. Cutler's creation was a stylistic cousin to Bibio, another BoC acolyte with an ear for Dilla. But it was also rough around the edges and disjointed. Ecstasy was a forward-thinking record, but also one that wasn't fully realized, so it's not too surprising that it didn't really catch on.
Cutler's follow-up, Emerald Fantasy Tracks, doesn't suffer from the same underdeveloped tendencies. Issued on his own Magic Wire Recordings imprint, the record represents a clean break from his past. Were it not for the name on the album cover, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was made by an entirely different artist. The sticky tropical atmosphere and knack for sentimental melodies are still there, but gone are the loping, static-riddled boom-bap beats. Instead, Culter offers jackknifing tempos and clattering 808s that recall 1990s breakbeat techno at its giddiest (think Underground Resistance's "Jupiter Jazz"), all of which adds up to an album that is dense but immediately engaging.
You get the feeling that Cutler has inhaled 15 years' worth of dance music in the year since his last full-length. This is no history lesson, though-- the music has too much of an emotional pull for that, as Cutler puts his ear for BoC's pitch-drunk melodies to good use. He has a weird knack for arranging clusters of sound to make them feel slow, unstable, and psychedelic. So the perceived speed of neck-whipped cuts like "Aquamarine" and the album's prismatic highlight, "Petrcane Beach Track", feel oddly off, even while the BPMs stay firmly in place. It's a trick that he puts to use carefully, and its application is disorienting in the most blissful sense.
It's that care and attention to detail that makes Emerald Fantasy Tracks more of an album and less of a grouping of similar cuts. The pacing is sharp, from the album's percolating, Eastern-influenced midsection to the downtempo, affecting closer "The Birds Don't Fly This High". Tech-y enough for beatheads but with a direct melodic sense that will appeal to even the most casual of electronic music observers, Emerald Fantasy Tracks is just as thrilling and sensual as the album title suggests, transcending nostalgia and instead drawing a drum-programmed path straight to the human heart.
