The hyper-chromatic music of Matt Cutler marks him out as a true impressionist; as Lone, he drizzles brightly coloured 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."[info from label]