Bleep

With a widescreen, intensely vivid imagination, Lone has leapt straight up to rave euphoria on his ninth album Hyperphantasia. The day to Always Inside Your Head’s woozy ambient soaked night of 2021, here the light shines on everything with a clarity afforded by Matt Cutler’s twenty years in the game, taking cues from the helium filled spectra of hyperpop and breakcore transferred to his own textural rave palettes. In his words, that means “unhinged, un-restrained, self-indulgent bat-shit pop music from an alternate dimension.”

Sugary interludes akin to guided meditation tapes prompt listeners to engage and imagine what kind of music will follow. “You will condition your mind to new ways of seeing,” say slippery voices in between the constant movements of house, garage, and hip hop crackling with energy. Perhaps an hourlong rave album is necessary in an era where everyone is tired of their phones and has a billion things going on in their heads at any moment. The ecstasy of Hyperphantasia’s electronics seeks to rejuvenate, and fill that noggin with something more colourful.

After working with a vocalist for the first time on his previous album, Lone peppers this tracklist with features, and even chops up his own vocals amid the dizzying variety of sounds and styles. The skeleton of a boom bap beat is filtered through a kaleidoscopic wormhole on ‘Throw The Ember’ as Juga-Naut’s lyrics travel on a similar stream of consciousness with pure creativity, while labelmate Lou Hayter lends classic R&B vibes to the bubblegum popping, funky, squeaky, crystal clear crashes of ‘Big World’. ‘Ascension.png’ conjures all of these possibilities, from slamming hang drums its ethereal atmosphere is carved into by a river of jagged bass and nasty breaks.

Hyperphantasia is an invitation to trip out, but also to trip in: get off the grid and inside the music, the fight to reclaim our attention spans and exercise our imaginations starts on the dancefloor.