Oneohtrix Point Never, the brainchild of New York's electronic musician
Daniel Lopatin
harked back to cosmic music of the 1970s.
The double-disc Rifts (No Fun Productions, 2009) is a compilation of
three albums:
Betrayed in the Octagon,
Russian Mind and
Zones Without People.
Betrayed in the Octagon (Deception Island, 2007) contained much
ceremonial music, some of it inspired by
new-age melodies (Behind The Bank and Betrayed In The Octagon),
and some of it by
Brian Eno's electronic vignettes
(the ghostly interference of Eyeballs, the
modest adagio of Parallel Minds). The real treat, however, was
the 20-minute evolution of an otherworldly choir via
Woe Is The Transgression and Woe Is The Transgression II,
that, especially in the second half, climbed metaphysical heights.
Russian Mind (No Fun Productions, 2008) focused on the more austere
elements of the previous album to deliver
Months, in the vein of the
crystalline ambient music of Harold Budd,
the eleven-minute Physical Memory, harking back to the
majestic cosmic music of the 1970s, and
the seven-minute Immanence, a polyphony of ecstatic new-age drones.
The mournful Grief And Repetition and the
bouncing minimalism of Russian Mind were elegant distractions.
Zones Without People (Arbor, 2009) did not quite capitalize on that
achievement. The
aggressive minimalism of Computer Vision,
the baroque hoe-down of Hyperdawn
and the lazy minimalism of Learning To Control Myself (despite its coda of war-like videogame sounds)
are not particularly original.
The ten-minute ballet for natural sounds and synthesizer Format & Journey North ends in apocalyptic drones, a welcome change of pace.
The EP A Pact Between Strangers (2008) contains
The Pretender and the
17-minute When I Get Back From New York of slowly evolving minimalist patterns.
Other significant compositions include the
meandering nine-minute Ships Without Meaning, the longest piece on the EP Ruined Lives (2008), and
the minimalist fugue for videogame timbres Transmat Memories on
the EP Transmat Memories (2008).
The EP Young Beidnahga (2009) added two lengthy suites that rank among
his most creative contributions to electronic soundpainting:
Continous Smooth Jazz Trepanation, a relentless pattern slowly
metabolized by a pastoral flute,
and the fluttering stream of consciousness of Young Beidnahga that
shifts timbre halfway and turns into a carillon of sorts.
Returnal (Editions Mego, 2010) is a more psychological work.
It begins with a traumatic shock: the
wall of squalls of Nil Admirari in the vein of Japanese noisecore.
The angst-filled drone of Describing Bodies,
the gothic turbulence of Stress Waves,
the transcendent tidal sunrise of Pelham Island Road,
the minimalist black home of Where Does Time Go,
sound like stages of life, leading up to the ancestral subconscious of
Preyouandi for found percussion.
Lopatin also released the cassette Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), containing 15 brief untitled pieces, a work that influenced vaporwave.
The idea was that an "eccojam" is a remix of an old pop song, and the remix consists in selecting a specific section of the song and repeating it at a slower speed than the original and warping its arrangement with sound effects such as reverb.
It is an exercise in nostalgia, but also a statement about how memory warps
the original events and transfers them into a different era as something else.
If A1 is a relatively straightforward remix of
Toto's Africa in a multitude of echoes,
A2 takes the Fleetwood Mac's Only Over You into another dimension by dissecting and shuffling the original
so that it assumes a different rhythm.
A3 conflates two laments and fails to do much with the first ("it doesn't matter anyway" from Jojo's Too Little Too Late) but turns the other one
("do you ever see" from Ian Van Dahl's Castles in the Sky) into a psychedelic requiem.
Michael Jackson's Morphine is
completely obliterated in A4, slowed down to crawling speed and wrapped
up into found sounds.
If A5 turns the Byrds' Everybody's Been Burned into little more than a somnolent mantra ("I know that door that shuts just before"),
A6 smothers Janet Jackson's wails in Lonely in a symphony of tinkling percussion.
A7 preserve the thundering essence of Aphrodite's Child's The Four Horsemen, and
A8 doesn't quite know what to do with Marvin Gaye's My Love Is Waiting and Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay,
and B1 is equally impotent with
Peter Gabriel's and Kate Bush's Don't Give Up and John Martyn's Sweet Little Mystery,
B2 annihilates Fleetwood Mac's Gypsy in industrial noise before being rescued by an anthemic rendition of Teddy Pendergrass' Love T.K.O..
B3 is too gentle with
Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street and Phil Collins's and Marilyn Martin's Separate Lives, and B4 doesn't dare to injure
Chris de Burgh's The Lady in Red, and
B5 wastes the opportunity to inflict pain to
2Pac's Me Against the World.
Equally disappointing are the closing
B6, which samples
Heart's These Dreams, and
B7 with Tears For Fears' Woman in Chains, Electric Light Orchestra's Letter from Spain, Linda and Cecil Womack's Catch and Don't Look Back.
This is certainly one of the best (re)mixtapes of all time but not
a significant step in Lopatin's artistic development.
The single Emergency Room (2011) introduced
Ford & Lopatin, the duo of Daniel Lopatin and Joel Ford of Tigercity,
a project steeped into synth-pop of the 1980s, a path continued on the album
Channel Pressure (Software, 2011).
The shorter songs of Oneohtrix Point Never's
Replica (Mexican Summer, 2011), that sample old television commercials,
felt warmer and more elegiac, particularly
Remember and Sleep Dealer.
Several pieces such as Andro border on bland collage of sonic tricks,
but the melodramatic Child Soldier shows how humane they can sound.
Lopatin's craft here is more sophisticated than on the previous albums but
it is employed for less ambitious compositions.
If nothing else, he got rid of the Brian Eno reference: his music is too
glitchy and neurotic to be compared with the inventor of static, soothing ambience.
The single
Everything Is Working (Hippos In Tanks) and the EP
That We Can Play (Hippos In Tanks)
introduced Games, the duo of Daniel Lopatin and Joel Ford, purveyors of
industrial dance music (Strawberry Sky).
Daniel Lopatin was also active as Infinity Window, a collaboration
with Taylor Richardson, that recorded
Artificial Midnight (Arbor, 2009) in the vein of
Emeralds-style new-age revival.
R Plus Seven (Warp, 2013) is too amateurish to be taken seriously.
Lopatin cannot focus on a composition and complete it.
Zebra is seven minutes of chaotic combinations of vocals and percussions.
Problem Areas (a cute wedding of synth-pop and minimalist repetition)
and
Boring Angel (beginning as a requiem but soon overwhelmed by a dizzying beat)
are mildly entertaining, but hardly shocking.
Most of the rest is either trivial (like the new-age dance of Along,
and the mournful litany of Chrome Country)
or unfinished
(the subliminal gently gliding ambient music of Inside World).
The EP Commissions I (Warp, 2014) collects occasional music:
the eight-minute Music For Steamed Rocks, that butchers a number of interesting ideas,
Meet Your Creator, a more cohesive minimalist composition for keyboards
and vocals that ends in a
magniloquent vocal hymn, and especially the seven-minute
I Only Have Eyes For You, a mesmerizing piece for multi-tracked choir
(with no electronic keyboard).
The highlight of Commissions II (Warp, 2015) is the 19-minute Suite From Magnetic Rose: subliminal subaquatic polyrhythms, ghostly droning vocals, a pipe organ, some kind of zither, chatter, monk chants. Then the music seems to implode but instead morphs into a tide of placid drones slowly drifting in vast cosmic spaces. It ends in church with a multi-tracked hymn and a solemn organ drone. It is certainly not revolutionary but it shows an honest attempt to produce something less derivative and more challenging.
Garden of Delete (Warp, 2015), ostensibly
a concept about a teenage alien called Ezra performed by the fictional band Kaoss Edge,
injected a bit of life in Lopatin's lifeless abstractions, but at the expense
of causing a jumbled mess of arrangements.
Instead of cold elegance, we get an overdose of industrial music and hip-hop
filtered through the combinatorial algorithm of a computer.
The madcap structures of the songs sound improvised or deliberately childish.
A single composition may harbor not only different melodies and beats but even wildly different moods.
Ezra boasts, among other things, a shrill cartoonish voice reminiscent of satirical Frank Zappa skits and a guitar riff reminiscecnt of Bryan Adams' Run To You.
Sticky Drama pastes together the same distorted childish voice, digital-hardcore electronics, house melody and black-metal blastbeats.
The eight-minute Mutant Standard is an even worse offender, with virtually
no center of mass other than a relentless tuneless beat that originates in epileptic videogame noise and spawns, after some goofy scat of the chipmunk voice, some foolish musique concrete.
After two minutes of droning, Freaky Eyes shoots out in rapid sequence a Bach-ian organ solo, a prog-rock synth melody, someone shouting, dissonance, and so on.
Best could be the deconstructed lullaby of Lift, but after two minutes
Lopatin doesn't know what to do with the trick of schizoid beats and
harpsichord.
Lopatin is certainly trying to expand his horizons:
Child Of Rage sounds like a remix of soft Brazilian jazz;
I Bite Through It alternates between mechanical patterns and chamber jazz;
and No Good is even a mournful neosoul ballad.
What is missing is not the intention but the inspiration.
These collages are neither sophisticated nor cohesive nor interesting.
If previous albums annoyed because they were trivial and derivative,
this one, frivolous and confused, is instead an irritating experience.
Lopatin also scored the soundtracks for Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (2013), Ariel Kleiman's Partisan (2015) and
Ben & Josh Safdie's Good Time (2017).
The latter is a return to retro synth-ambience with
Hospital Escape/Access-A-Ride and Leaving the Park.
But the compositional limits are still the same: the seven-minute Good Time unwinds a crescendo that doesn't know where to go next.
One keeps waiting for the hook or the riff or something to come out of the climax but instead one simply gets a tedious new-age litany that ends in a
menacing nebula (yawn).
However, The Acid Hits could be his best composition in a while,
finally a seamless and dramatic electronic poem
with demonic beats, minimalist repetition, and a great solo of cosmic organ.
The Pure And The Damned is a lugubrious ballad sung by Iggy Pop.
It is hard to believe that Age Of (Warp, 2018) was made by Lopatin.
It begins in neoclassical mode with the
slightly-dissonant harpsichord carillon of Age Of.
But then it introduces Lopatin the singer-songwriter:
Babylon mimics the magniloquent angst of Roger Waters,
and The Station is a falsetto neo-soul ballad.
The slow melancholy litany Black Snow, wrapped in glitches and
distortion, and the romantic Same, drowned in distortions,
reenact stereotypes of pop muzak in an avantgarde setting.
Meanwhile, Toys 2 is as good as melodramatic instrumental pop gets,
the surreal exotic vignette RayCats mocks ethnic movie soundtracks,
and Warning is a brutal version of Steve Reich's vocal minimalism (Drumming).
These are the most straighforward, linear, cohesive compositions of his
career.
The cacophonic collaboration with James Blake,
We'll Take It, sounds totally out of context.
It could be his best album yet.
