Lone

Electronic music has always harbored a futurist streak, but Lone—a.k.a. Nottingham, UK native Matt Cutler—knows that looking back can be just as sweet. Born in the mid-’80s, too late to experience early raves firsthand, Cutler began making dance music as a teenager, experimenting with ambient textures and hip-hop beats on cracked software. By the late 2000s, then in his twenties, he was filtering his nostalgia into rose-tinted productions steeped in the electronic sounds of yesteryear. Where 2008’s Lemurian and 2009’s Ecstasy & Friends tapped the languid tempos and woozy frequencies of trip-hop and IDM, by 2011’s Emerald Fantasy Tracks, Cutler had thrown himself into early-’90s rave revivalism at its most idyllic, smearing buoyant chords and prismatic synths over crisp, rolling house and techno grooves. In the years since, he’s kept shuttling between styles while reinforcing the uniqueness of his sound, subsuming period references—rattling breakbeats, Balearic flutes—into a singular evocation of electronic music’s Edenic past.