Lone – “Ascension.png”

It’s been a couple of years since Matt Cutler, the British producer who makes playful and emotive dance music under the name Lone, released “Triton,” his last single. Today, Lone returns with a new one-off called “Ascension.png.” It’s a good one, even if the title just automatically makes me wonder why Lone didn’t call it “Ascension.jpeg” instead. Quite honestly, fuck a PNG file. I have lost good blog posts because I accidentally uploaded a PNG instead of a JPEG to this website and somehow made my whole computer fuck up.

“Ascension.png” is a starts out woozily and pretty, with thumb-piano plinks and soft clouds of synth. Then the jungle breakbeats explode in from every angle, and the feeling dramatically shifts. It’s a very cool piece of production. In a press release, Lone explains its origin:

I had this dream about a year ago where I was floating on a small raft in the ocean, floating away from a tiny desert island. The whole dream was just me on this raft watching the island get smaller and smaller as I floated further away from it. It felt like my subconscious was trying to tell me something about the nature of time. The colors I see in my head when I hear this track are more or less exactly like the ones in that dream. The track has loads of amens in it as well.

When Lone talks about “loads of amens,” he means the “Amen” break, the iconic funk breakbeat that has famously powered the entire genre of jungle music since its inception. Sorry if it’s condescending to bring that up. I just figured that not everyone knows, you know? Hear “Ascension.png” below.

“Ascension.png” is out now on Greco-Roman.