Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The Nottingham-based artist is a master of indulgence, jamming his tracks with jagged, aggressive rhythms and glistening melodies. Cutler draws heavily from rave music’s more explicitly colorful side, embracing the all-out intensity of breakbeat techno and hardcore’s effervescent steamroll; like many of his contemporaries, he was barely old enough to ride a bike when those strains of dance music emerged the first time around, so his work as Lone is essentially a reconstruction, an alternate version of the past put together by someone who wasn’t around to experience the sound's genesis.
Cutler sidesteps claims of misplaced nostalgia through sheer inventiveness. After working in earnest near the end of the 2000s, he first caught a larger audience’s ear with 2010’s kaleidoscopic Emerald Fantasy Tracks, released on his own Magic Wire imprint. An eight-track collection that felt less like a unified whole and more like a collection of singles, Emerald Fantasy Tracks gave a brighter tint to to the dazzling grit of techno luminaries like Underground Resistance. Resurrected European techno label R&S took notice and signed Cutler, and two years later he released what stands as his magnum opus, Galaxy Garden. It was a massive achievement and also startling in its originality. Upon its release, Cutler told The Stool Pigeon that the record was “influenced by nothing," and although rave music loomed larger than ever in his sound, the comment made some sense. Galaxy Garden is one of those records that truly feels boundless, a head trip that practically overflowed with beatific melodies and inviting textures. (It’s unsurprising that, in the same year, Glasgow's Rustie tapped Cutler to contribute a new track to his era-defining contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series; maximalism is a central tenet to the Lone sound.)
One of the decade’s singular electronic records, Galaxy Garden was a thrilling document that made you wonder where Cutler would take his sound next. Reality Testing turns out to be both a left turn and a back-to-basics move. Largely abandoning rave’s warp-speed tempos and sensual overload, Reality Testing finds Cutler shifting his focus to the dusty hip-hop grooves of auteurs like J Dilla and Madlib, two artists regularly name-checked by European dance producers as formative influences. Cutler’s no exception: his early work drew from those artists’ loping knock as much as it did from the hazy electronic music of Boards of Canada, with 2009’s Ecstasy & Friends (released on Actress’ continually ahead-of-the-curve Werk Discs imprint) being the last time he explored those sounds so thoroughly.
Depending on the your relationship Cutler’s earlier music, the shift in focus on Reality Testing can prove initially disappointing—there’s no shortage of producers currently attempting to hardwire hip-hop motifs to Boards of Canada’s iridescent glow, and he's covered some of this ground before. It might take a few listens to get on Cutler’s current wavelength, but approaching Reality Testing with an open mind yields great rewards. It’s one of his most assured and confident efforts and it provides a perfect gateway into the Lone sound.
I've heard comparisons between Reality Testing’s more explicitly hip-hop-influenced cuts and the work of Wolverhampton producer Stephen Wilkinson’s Bibio project. The two artists operate in different lanes—Wilkinson’s more predisposed to song-based structures, whereas Cutler derives his energy from dance’s lack of set definitions—but the similarities are there. “Restless City” is all tumbling claps and record-skipping sounds, with a few needle-drop effects to add a sense of halting texture; “2 Is 8” sounds deliciously retro, with vocal samples occasionally intruding on the track’s knocking drums and steam-pipe melody that resembles an alternate take on the “Sesame Street” theme. “Meeker Warm Energy” oozes West Coast lackadaisical vibes, with honeyed static slathering a Dilla-aping beat; early single “Airglow Fires” takes the hat-tipping a step further by calling back to the vocal sample from Dilla’s Donuts neck-whipper “The Twister (Huh, What)”, speeding up the easygoing tempo and covering the thing in chunky chords reminiscent of Detroit techno.
The sounds of early-gen Detroit dance music is Reality Testing’s other main influence; the hollow chords that anchor “Aurora Northern Quarter” bring to mind Derrick May, and “Vengeance Video” is the album’s most straightforward house cut, a patiently skipping tune that benefits from a loopy synth entering at the halfway point. Another of Cutler’s frequent touchstones, the clean sparkle of new age, is all over Reality Testing. Although the embrace of new age in dance music has become a common trend among young producers, few apply those textures as effectively as Cutler does. Wind chimes enter and exit—opener “First Born Seconds” is literally two minutes of swarming, spa-ready drone—while closer “Cutched Under” calls back to the downtempo glory of the Anneka-featuring Galaxy Garden capper “Spirals”, melding warm tones to the type of marching percussion that overtook Bristol’s bass sound circa 2010.
Cutler’s ear melody takes center stage on Reality Testing. His touch is distinctive and generous—the Lone remix of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs cut “Feral” wrung benevolence out of that album’s most abstract, slight track—and here his jams run free, from the delectable yo-yo synth line that crashes through the head-nod of “Meeker Warm Energy” to the sparkling pan pipes that whirl around the speedy house motifs of “Begin to Begin”. Similar to kindred spirit and Cologne producer Motor City Drum Ensemble, Cutler proves most effective at applying personal dabs of melody to his own vision of the past.
Reality Testing is Cutler’s easiest listen—you can imagine this music playing over coffee shop speakers as much as you could put a rapper on top of it—and as such it may seem less innovative when placed up against his previous two full-lengths. It’s more spare than the dense Galaxy Garden, but it’s also a few minutes longer than that album, and by comparison its relatively placid back half blurs together a little more than the acid-infused pyrotechnics of its predecessors's losing cuts. Regardless, Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game.
