Lonefront is the production moniker of Ross Lafayette Hutchens, a hybrid trackmaker, Live PA and modular synth artist whose work is both integral to and anomalous within Minneapolis’s percolating techno underground. His recording catalog reveals a project that remains singularly focused while navigating a slurry of idiomatic shifts and material rigs: the churning Cimilada Qaxootiga (MJMJ, 2017) drew from materials re-composed from a live modular set, while 2019’s Plastic Dreams EP seems to signal toward the place where Gradient Descent dwells.

Gradient Descent marks the crystallization of Lonefront’s trademark carbon-on-silicon method into a sharp and distinct compositional style: equally deft with unruly, extended trips into modular deep-dreaming as he is with sculptural sound-design gestures that dangle listeners in the void of ‘post-rave,’ Hutchens’s defamiliarized mode of techno re-stitches these busted compositional forms into a “program for the reanimation of dead materials.”  The brisk triad of extended pieces on Gradient Descent takes up distinct techno-idioms while maintaining a unitary feel throughout. 

The lead title track bubbles with a pressurized tension, lightly surfing a recombinant grid of narrow arpeggios and gardenpath rhythms before opening up onto a plain filled with gushing channel noise. The pressure never quite boils over before the torched-metal orchestrals of “Fear Collapse” slam into lock-step. A lucid and dramatic centerpiece, the track shows Lonefront’s aptitude to reroute oft-abused generic markers (in this case, the industrial kick) by channeling them into a system that draws out latent affect without demanding it. The rinsed, cackling synth warbles of “Everything is Dripping with Laughter” round out the effort, summoning a base of warm colundi frequencies and Stalker-reminiscent reverberations, riding the bounce of self-inoculating humor coyly toward a receding info-horizon.