Lone - Galaxy Garden

Lone – real name Matt Cutler – has spoken about Galaxy Garden as feeling a little like his first proper album and, if you explore his back catalogue, you can see what he means. Early albums like Everything Is Changing Colour and Lemurian were clearly indebted to hiphop, while later material like the critically acclaimed Emerald Fantasy Tracks from 2010 and last year’s Echolocations EP brought in elements of rave and Chicago house, just as several other UK producers were embracing similar influences. Though this was all strong, consistent material, you felt like this was music that paid tribute to particular eras and genres, like faithful exercises in nostalgia.

On Galaxy Garden, Lone sounds like he has his own voice for the first time. There are still clear elements of rave, house and Detroit techno in there – track titles like ‘Crystal Caverns 1991’ are something of a giveaway – but they’ve been melted down and recast in even more lurid shapes and colours, with bright pop melodies warped in new directions or tacked on at odd angles. Every artist needs to work through their influences, and Cutler has done this at length, emerging in a uniquely ‘Lone’ world that combines dance music’s earthbound beginnings and its intergalactic possibilities.

‘New Colour’ kicks things off with a bright, off-kilter melody over a bed of polyrhythms that obscure the 4/4 beat that Cutler may have spotlighted on previous records. ‘The Animal Pattern’ dresses up the kind of acid Aphex Twin was churning out in his early days, while single and standout ‘Crystal Caverns 1991’ sets a huge rave melody (bound to put a stupid grin on your face) alongside pounding jungle rhythms and the kind of breakdown that immediately gets you thinking of grainy footage of thousands of people dancing in fields.

For the most part, however, Galaxy Garden is more subtle that that – far from consistently conjuring up images of open-air raves, it sounds more claustrophobic and introspective, as if the rave is happening in one person’s head. So you get one of two Machinedrum collaborations, ‘As A Child’, lowering the BPM and twisting the influences into something different, or the dense rhythms and synths of tracks like ‘Raindance’ and ‘Lying In The Reeds’ conjuring up the atmosphere of a thick, otherworldly rainforest. Cutler has talked about his aim to “communicate as much of my imagination to the listener as I possibly can”, and it does feel like these ‘history of dance’ elements are being filtered and amalgamated not for nostalgic purposes, but towards something else.

It’s become a bit of cliché to talk about electronic artists reappropriating dance music genres as a way of reflecting on time, and even mourning (hi Actress, Burial and Hype Williams, for starters) – Cutler is doing something similar perhaps, but seems to be ultimately aiming for a kind lurid futurism that makes him unique. The album creates these weird sonic worlds, half deeply familiar and half alien. As a whole, Galaxy Garden can be a lot to take it an at once – bright, gaudy, retro, experimental - but as final track ‘Spirals’ (a successful combination of Anneka’s pop vocals and Lone’s restless instrumental) plays out, you realise that, for the most part, you’ve been swept up by it all.