Oneohtrix Point Never

Oneohtrix Point Never

Village Voice, July 6, 2010

by Simon Reynolds

Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor.  Every inch of surface area is covered with tsotchkes: a Tupac mug, little sculpted owls, John and Yoko kissing on the sleeve of "Just like Starting Over".  Besides the computer, a stack of tomes represent upcoming areas of research for the erudite, philosophy-minded Lopatin:  a guide to Alchemy & Mysticism, a lavish book on ECM Records, Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity.  Most intriguing, though, are the notes posted above his work-space:  maxims, self-devised or sampled from thinkers, that are midway between Eno's Oblique Strategies and  those embroidered homilies people once stuck on their kitchen walls.   

"Do More With Less (Ephemeralize)" is fairly self-explanatory. The more opaque "'Linear'  -- Kill Time vs. 'Sacred'" is clarified by Lopatin thusly: "People think killing time is bad, you should be productive --but when music is at its most sanctified, it's a total time kill."   There's something in Hebrew and Cyrillic that nods to Lopatin's Russian Jewish background.  Most revealing of these "little critical reminders" is "N.W.B.", which stands for "Noise Without Borders".  "Everything is noise," elaborates Lopatin, whose yellowish hair and reddish beard mesh pleasingly with his off-purple flannel shirt and kindly, dreamy green eyes. "Noise can be sculpted down to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise. But it's also to do with the idea of not having genre affiliations".

Oneohtrix Point Never emerged out of the noise underground, but for a long while Lopatin felt like an outcast among the outcasts. The ideas he was developing--bringing in euphonious influences from Seventies cosmic trance music and Eighties New Age, creating atmospheres of serenity tinged with desolation--went against the grain. "My shit wasn't popping off at all", he laughs. This was 2003-2005, when Wolf Eyes defined the scene with their rock 'n 'roll attitude.  Lopatin and a handful of kindred spirits such as Emeralds felt a growing "boredom with noise, a sense we'd done it: we get this emotion." Around 2006, the scene began to shift slowly in their direction. "We were all talking about Klaus Schulze," he recalls of the gig where he first bonded with Emeralds. He notes also the huge clouds of pot smoke pouring from vans outside the venue, Cambridge, MA's Twisted Village.  "Drugs!" is his answer when asked about how the noise scene reached its current ethereal 'n' tranquil state-of-art. "Noise, at the end of the day, is headspace music. Drugs are a big part of getting into that experience, from a playing side, and from a fan/listener perspective too."

A flurry of Oneohtrix releases plus collaborative side projects such as Infinity Window made Lopatin a name to watch. But it was last year's Rifts--a double CD for Carlos Giffoni's No Fun label pulling together a trilogy of hard-to-find earlier releases--that propelled him to underground star status. U.K. magazine The Wire anointed Rifts the #2 album of 2009. The CD also sold out its two thousand pressing, making it a blockbuster success in a scene where the majority of releases come out in small runs anywhere from 300 to 30 copies. Rifts was further disseminated widely on the web, talked about and listened to with an intensity that sales figures don't reflect. 

Another profile-raising "hit" for Lopatin was Sunsetcorp's "Nobody Here"-- a mash-up of Chris DeBurgh's putrid "The Lady in Red" and a vintage computer graphic called "Rainbow Road," that has so far received 30,000 YouTube hits.  Lopatins calls his audio-video collages "echo jams": they typically combine Eighties sources (a vocal loop from Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac, say, with a sequence from a Japanese or Soviet hi-fi commercial) and slow them down narcotically (an idea inspired by DJ Screw). Lopatin collated his best echo jams on the recent Memory Vague DVD.  His Eighties obsession also comes through with the MIDI-funk side project Games, a collaboration with Joel Ford from Brooklyn band Tiger City. (Ford also lives in a room at the other end of the Bushwick apartment).  Lopatin plays me a new Games track that sounds like it could be a Michael McDonald song off the Running Scared O/S/T and says "We want people to be playing this in cars."

In what is simultaneously a further step forward and another step sideways, the new Oneohtrix album Returnal is released this month on the highly respected experimental electronic label Mego.  Although Lopatin's preoccupations with memory are similar to the label's most renowned artist Fennesz, sonically Returnal has little in common with Mego's glitchy past.  Yet Returnal is a departure for Lopatin, too.  Several tracks adhere to the classic OPN template established by tunes like "Russian Mind' and "Physical Memory": rippling arpeggiations, sweet melody offset by sour dissonance, grid-like structures struggling with cloudy amorphousness. But the most exciting tunes are forays into completely other zones. 

Opening with the sculpted distortion-blast of "Nil Admirari" is a fuck you to those who have Lopatin pegged as "that Tangerine Dream guy". It's also a concept piece, a painting of a modern household, where the outside world's violence pours in through the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic data: "The mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment killing some James Cameron-type predator."" At the opposite extreme, the title track is an exquisitely mournful ballad redolent of the early solo work of Japan's David Sylvian. Lopatin's vocals have featured occasionally before as Enya-esque texture-billow but never so songfully as on "Returnal" (qualities that emerge even more strongly on the forthcoming remix/cover voiced by Anthony Hegarty).

Finally, most astonishingly, is "‡Preyouandi∆", the closing track: a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating,  a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe.  This "blues for global warming" interpretation turns out to be completely off-base, but "‡Preyouandi∆" is the sort of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery.

Both "Returnal" and "‡Preyouandi∆" contain textural tints that explicitly echo the hyper-visual sounds and visionary concepts of Jon Hassell, who back in the 1980s explored what he called "4th World Music":  a polyglot sound mixing Western hi-tech and ethnic ritual musics.  "I wanted to make a world music record," says Lopatin. "But make it hyper-real, refracted through not really being in touch with the world.   Everything I know about the world is seen through Nova specials, Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic."   He explains that the stuff that indirectly influenced Returnal were things like the unnaturally vivid and stylized tableaus you might see in that kind of documentary or magazine article--a 100 Sufis praying in a field, say.  "So I'm painting these pictures, not of the actual world, but of us watching that world." 

Oneohtrix Point Never, Elizabeth Fraser

“Tales from the Trash Stratum”

[from Pitchfork end of year tracks blurbs 2021)

The original “Trash Stratum” on 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never entwined distortion and euphony in fairly familiar Dan Lopatin fashion. This year’s drastic reinvention lovingly collages ‘80s production motifs: pizzicato string-flutters as fragrant as Enya, blobs of reverb-smudged piano that evoke Harold Budd, high-toned pings of bass that could be The Blue Nile or Seventeen Seconds Cure. It’s like Lopatin is a bowerbird building a glittering nest to attract a mate – and succeeds in reeling in the onetime Cocteau Twin.  Fraser’s contributions -  ASMR-triggering wisps of sibilant breath, chirruping syllables from a disintegrated lullaby – are closer to a diva’s warm-up exercises than an actual aria, and sometimes you long for her to take full-throated flight into song.  But it’s lovely to hear the Goth goddess brought into the glitchy 21st Century. 

Queries + replies from / for Amanda Petrusich and her New Yorker profile of Lopatin

1.    Dan's work is really conceptual, but I'm also curious how it lands on you as MUSIC -- how you see it fitting in amongst his genre peers, and also his predecessors? My sense is that he's not the first artist to do some of these things, but there's something about his work that feels really special.

 

Dan is one of the pioneers and exemplars of what I call conceptronica. Sometimes with that not-quite-a-genre (it’s more like a mode of operation) the framing can be a bit overbearing. Occasionally he’s veered too far that way. But unlike many of those who operate like that (i.e. with a highly articulated rationale pitched to the audience and to critics) , at its best his music has an element of sheer beauty and emotional pull to it that transcends, or just bypasses, the verbalization. I’m thinking of pieces like “Physical Memory”, which just aches with feeling.  

I’m not even sure I can pinpoint what the emotions are – often it's like strange new affects of the future.

But then something like his most famous eccojam, “Nobody Here” – the emotion here is human and relatable. He’s said it’s about his own loneliness in New York, having recently moved there. Which is not the emotion in the original song,  a romantic ballad. But somehow he was able to take that little vocal sliver and repurpose it, in combination with that early computer graphics animation in the video. I don’t think there’s any element in “Nobody Here” that sonically or visually was generated by him, it’s all found material, but out of it he created something new and emotionally resonant. 

When he first came along he was identified with this scene that some called hypnagogic pop and then later chillwave was the term used for the more song-oriented stuff out of that area. So he would be bracketed with artists like James Ferraro and Emeralds – a lot of the emphasis was recycling Eighties mainstream pop or rehabilitating New Age music. When I tried to pinpoint what defined this wave of artists I came up with this idea that it was Pop Art meets psychedelia. So, reusing detritus from mass culture, but shot through with this hallucinatory quality.

In some ways, although he uses older musical material or references it, Dan’s ancestors aren’t so much in music but in the visual arts – the Appropriation Artists in particular, which is essentially Pop Art part 2..

 

  

2.    I'm super interested in an idea you write about a lot in "Retromania," that the Internet has left everything essentially untethered to space and time, and therefore we're moving laterally, and not backwards, when we recycle or reappropriate or repatriate or recontextualize ideas from the past. I'm curious what you think might be dangerous -- if anything! -- about this new way of consuming culture? 

 

I don’t know if it’s dangerous – it’s disorienting for someone like me who grew up with ideas of progress and sort of construable linear evolution for music and culture, in which some things get definitively superseded and you move on to the next stage, ideally at exhilarating speed. That was my outlook and my expectation growing up, but it might already have been a somewhat old-fashioned sort of modernism even then – those ideas lingered far longer in popular music than they did in art and architecture.

Dan has some great quotes that I used in Retromania (from the original interview I did with him for Village Voice) to do with how we’re living in  a time of reprocessing culture, this enormous junk heap of material left over from the 20^th Century, it’s an aftermath phase of salvage and tinkering and recycling.

That said, there are clearly plenty of new technological things happening that are creating new cultural forms or the potential for them. At the time of writing Retromania I didn’t realise how much Auto-Tune would become a creative tool and lead to all this completely new-sounding music, particularly in hip hop but also on the experimental fringe. The voice became the field of action in terms of experimentation. (Dan’s done quite a bit of stuff in that vein, whether it’s things like “Sleep Dealer” or the vocal entity created for Garden of Delete)

And then there’s AI.

So maybe that archival moment that was happening in music in the 2000s (and also in art  - reenactments, what Claire Bishop recently wrote about in terms of research based art), maybe that has passed. It was a temporary phase created by the way that the Internet, YouTube etc seemed to erupt into existence and suddenly we were all sitting amidst this enormous cultural junkheap, It was irresistible to explore and excavate. Overpowering in terms of its claims on our attention and how creative people’s imaginations were affected. Indeed, there was a kind of helplessness to it, I think.

That is still going on, there’s a lot of archival based work, revivalism, pastiche - but there are things that are happening, enabled with newer technology, that result in the genuinely unforeheard.

 

3.    This is kind of a weird one, but does it feel, to you, like Dan has invented something new, some new idiom or sound?

I think he has, in moments, particular tracks. There’s a lot of referencing and recycling –  the whole hypergrunge idea was very clever.

But something like “‡PREYOUANDI∆” – I can hear faint echoes of earlier artists (like a bit of Jon Hassell maybe) but it’s really like nothing I’ve heard.

Even “Physical Memory”, while you might think vaguely of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, it doesn’t really sound much like those groups. It’s probably more inspired by an idea of the analogue synth epic, these very long electronic mindscapes that could sometimes take up the whole of one side of an LP. 

A lot of what has fascinated Dan is older futurisms - the pathos of new technology that gets obsolesced but also might contain dormant possibilities that were passed over too quickly at the time in the onrush of development. You can hear all these echoes or reactivations of 1980s early digital textures and effects. 

So the whole idea of the future and the new is sort of simultaneously jettisoned, or questioned, and yet still has this pull, still continues to have this hold on the imagination .