Oneohtrix Point Never

Oneohtrix Point Never – Ezra

/ David James / 2 Comments

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This is the final bit of Oneohtrix Point Never news before the new album, Garden Of Delete, drops tomorrow.

OPN, aka Daniel Lopatin, has finally released the first real song, Ezra, as a single on Soundcloud. I really want to share this with everyone because it’s not only a great introduction to the new sound; it’s a layered world of sound unto itself. Enjoy:

Please allow myself to quote… myself here:

“Ezra, the first proper track, leaps from the midi-fired dreams of the previous album, reaching speed behind sheets of Philip Glass-like shrill arpeggios. It appears to crest before the two minute mark, suddenly projecting the nanomachine-clogged cyberpunk future of 2000’s Deus Ex in silhouette. Maybe it’s a sample?”

I think it is a sample. Decide for yourself.

Speaking of this game, the original Deus Ex is both an action-RPG masterpiece, and a definitive work in the cyberpunk canon. It’s the precursor to modern games like Fallout. It’s got a great soundtrack too. Sounds like Lopatin might have played it, too. It’s about $7 on Steam if you’ve never played it.

So I’ve written a lot about Lopatin’s work lately, partly out of excitement for this work, and partly out of a desire to connect with what I see as the most forward-thinking, interesting music being made today. If this is the first piece on the site you’re reading, you might want to see these:

Review of Garden of Delete

First single: “I Bite Through It”

Oneohtrix Point Never “Mutant Standard”

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Mindbending “Sticky Drama” Video

Garden of Delete drops tomorrow! It’s his first full length in 2 years, so be sure to check the album out on Spotify or wherever, if you’ve been a good kid and ignored the leak. I’m just hoping that gorgeous 2LP vinyl arrives on time.

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Mindbending “Sticky Drama” Video

/ David James / 3 Comments

Oneohtrix Point Never has finally revealed something that he’s been building up to all year, on the eve of the Garden of Delete release. It’s a cyberpunk post-apocalypse in miniature, a two-part short film acting as both video for the song Sticky Drama and introduction to the world behind the album.

It’s super weird and I love it. Click to the second track if you want to just hear the song, but I promise that the buildup is worth it.

So we’ve got CD armor, sentient poo commanded by tamagotchis, those “laser” swords I used to beg for at the circus, and most of all fucking green slime. It’s like every early 90s Nickelodeon show rolled into an adolescent apocalypse. The aesthetics here are deliciously trashy, reveling in the bent cultural signposts of Daniel Lopatin’s (and my own) childhood. This is flush with the effluvia of a thousand British Knight commercials, LARP battles, and sticky episodes of You Can’t Do That On Television.

The video acts as a road map for the album itself, contextualizing the wild array of sounds with unforgettable visuals. Listening to Garden of Delete after watching this, I’m now able to place the chirpy vocoder vocal that’s heard throughout, from the intro to emotional peak Animals. It’s endearing and unnerving to know that it comes from a mutated Tamagotchi nestled in a mound of sentient sludge.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m going to spend some time rewatching the video. I’ve already got ideas about Legends of the Hidden Temple crumbling into some sadistic Battle Royale situation, and I’m still very much stuck on that . If you’re interested in some deeper reading about next week’s album release, check out my review of Garden of Delete.

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As for the song itself, I’ll quote my own words from the review:

“Sticky Drama, the first “single-friendly” tune of the set, realizes its structure in the angst and black makeup of the nu-metal era. The song manages to sidestep cliche and extract the wireframe model of what made the best of those songs work, with giant dynamic shifts, telegraphed bass drops, and distortion-croaked vocals rendered exotic and purposeful.”

It’s a really good tune, and one of the coolest aspects of the video is that we hear the aural landmarks of the rest of the album scattered throughout: flashes of the melting plastic vocals, the melancholic melodies, and the digital storms in between.

The album drops next Friday, November 13th, and it’s one of the best pieces of music this year. I’ve written a whole lot about it already, because Oneohtrix Point Never is frankly one of the most interesting artists working today.

2 8 1 4 – 新しい日の誕生

/ David James / 15 Comments

2814 Birth of a New Day

Sometimes there’s no better way to discover music than aimlessly sliding through the dark dream of the internet.

One day at the office I was looking for something that I could drift to. I wanted a sound that stretched like taffy until it reached the horizon. I needed my surroundings blurred beyond recognition, smeared into the very fabric of reality. With 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) by 2814, I found exactly what I was looking for.

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Oneohtrix Point Never “Mutant Standard”

/ David James / 1 Comment

So Oneohtrix Point Never has dropped a huge single today in the lead up to his new album release next month. The new song is called Mutant Standard and it’s one of the best tracks he’s crafted yet.

Don’t worry about the grey “no video here” backdrop, the song will begin as soon as you click play. I suppose that’s Oneohtrix, aka Daniel Lopatin, having a little fun with the youtube-as-audio format.

What I love about this 8 minute juggernaut, cresting the center of the album’s running time, is that it finally cracks open that experimental edge of Lopatin’s sound and reveals an earnest dance beat, if only for a moment. When I reviewed the upcoming album, Garden Of Delete, I wrote the following:

“Mutant Standard bursts out clad in minimal techno, snowballing into a close cousin of last year’s kaleidoscopic (and near-perfect) Syro. The tune expands, bursting at the seams with a ragged midi arpeggio before fading into new age bliss. It wasn’t until the song ended that I realized it’s the most straightforward “dancey” track Lopatin has ever recorded.

The song reaches a skidding, frantic momentum that reminds me of nothing so much as the most mind-shredding moment from Aphex Twin’s noisy classical/techno masterpiece, Drukqs. I’m thinking Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michael’s Mount. The ending quivers and bows out, shuffling offstep like a particularly warm Autechre song.”

I still feel pretty much the exact same way, so there’s that. Enjoy the tune! The album drops November 13, 2015, and you can preorder from Warp already. Since it leaked nearly a month ago, a lot of us have had time to become very familiar with the sound, so this monster of a tune might not be news. If that’s the case, I hope that if enjoy it like I do, you’re paying for the real deal when it’s out. It’s important to encourage progressive, adventurous music like this.

Gora Sou – Ramifications

/ David James / Leave a comment

goraSou

It’s all thanks to Giant Claw.

Beginning with last year’s stunning Dark Web (see Best of 2014), I fell in love with Orange Milk. The record label hosts a roster of consistently mind-bending artists who have put out some of the most innovative, transgressive, and ultimately fun music of the past couple years. So when another artist I highly respect mentioned Gora Sou’s new Orange Milk release, Ramifications, I had to listen right then and there.

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Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden Of Delete

/ David James / 16 Comments

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Oneohtrix Point Never has returned with a massive new album you can call G.O.D. It peels up the corner tiles of a thousand realities over 45 minutes, blooming micro-worlds of sound and immediately dissolving in head-on collisions.

For the first time in years, OPN – real name Daniel Lopatin – hasn’t completely restructured his sound, yet I’m feeling the same sense of dizzying vertigo that he’s made a career out of conjuring. In a real sense, the strongest component of his appeal has always been that daring sense of surprise, the act of an artist venturing over the edge of the known music world and bringing back sounds that I’ve never even anticipated, much less heard.

More than a style, it’s an idea, a philosophy. In the wrong hands, it can become a cheap trick. This is something far more substantial.

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Oneohtrix Point Never has a new song, first single from Garden of Delete

/ David James / 1 Comment

If you follow this blog at all, you’ll know that Oneohtrix Point Never is one of my favorite living artists. Every time he releases new material, it’s a shock to the system, a completely unexpected delight.

This time is no different. Here’s the song, I Bite Through It:

Supposedly he’s been on an industrial tip after crafting a special set of abrasive material for his tour in support of Nine Inch Nails, but this sounds, typically for OPN, like an utter mushroom cloud deconstruction and reconfiguration of the genre, if anything. It’s too early to fully process this, and like every album of his, we’ll need the full context to truly understand. I’m just jazzed we’ve got something new to enjoy!

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The album comes out November 13 on Warp (WARP266) and you can preorder it from Bleep. I’m doing that right now because I’m a hopeless addict.