rimental music, comparing any artist of the genre to Brian Eno has become the equivalent of idly comparing the latest folk-pop sensation to a certain Robert Zimmerman. But when Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never speaks in interviews, his characteristic tonality and diction strongly recall those of the ambient pioneer: a precisely-tuned ear to minute sonic details and the subtleties of musical timbre.
“I’m trying to take the past and make it an abstract material that I can then start from scratch and work with, you know,” Lopatin said in an interview with FACT. “And I just need it because I need material, I need stuff, I need paint.”
A common criticism lobbed at modern “indie culture” is its obsession with “retromania.” (See Disclosure’s 90s garage revival or chillwave’s perpetual nostalgia obsession.) And the stranger spheres of popular music inhabited by Oneohtrix boast no immunity either. Earlier this year, the short-lived micro-genre “vaporwave” constructed dioramas of VHS soundbites and elevator muzak, and pop-experimentalist James Ferraro purposefully deformed his own studio instrumental work to reproduce the textures of such sampled sound. Driven by grainy, tautly-wound vocal samples, Oneohtrix’s last release, Replica, certainly placed him in line with such acts.
But Lopatin’s new release, R Plus 7, leaves the samples behind in favor of analogue hardware. It’s a stylistic step forward, one that continues to recall memories as a vantage point for looking ahead. Like sample musicians who utilize the entirety of recorded music as a vast toolbox for sonic appropriation, Lopatin treats the past as an aesthetic grab bag for futuristic repurposing.
But while Ferraro and vaporwave artists both affect an oddly mixed dose of hypnagogia and nostalgia, Oneohtrix paints more emotionally diverse and intricate soundscapes. Moving away from the ethereal drone elements of his initial releases and Replica’s dusty menacing density, his latest release flattens his sound onto a more horizontal plane, routinely utilizing silence as a means of distinctly defining the edges of his particular synth sounds.
In that vein, the album holds an intimate relationship with the physical; Lopatin prolongs your focus on each musical object, each distinctive in its bizarre sound color, slowly unfolding and transmuting into different forms over minutes. In R Plus Seven, the sonic approaches the visual, as moments in audio find a tactile solidity.
Each of the tracks exhibits a novel approach to musical form. Most songs meander through specific phases: the spastic synth stabs in “Zebra” lend a high level of rhythmic movement until halfway through, when the song enters a sudden ambient reversal, ending a particularly animated piece by unfurling slowly into the atmosphere.
Other tracks, like the wanderlust-inspired “Inside World,” traverse several tonally disparate landscapes with little revisiting. “Problem Areas,” on the other hand, sticks to one simple, rhythmic MIDI line, which phases through a number of different synths until the song detours to a brief airy bridge in the middle. The result of this structural erraticism is that moments become the object of focus, as opposed to the narrative development of structured sections; Lopatin directs your attention to the “now” and not to expectations of harmonic change or melodic development.
Take a look at the recent wonky music video for “Problem Areas.” The three minutes cycle through a number of arrangements of objects on a bizarrely lighted table: an upturned chess set, a cracked iPhone, three normal bananas, and a fourth, silver banana. The absurd humor lies artfully diametric to the occasionally protested “pretension” of experimental music. Each of these objects seems oddly, methodically selected and placed.
Likewise in the song, Lopatin meticulously sculpts and selects each sound for its specific entrance and tonal metamorphosis. The first couple minutes of “Boring Angel” feature muted liquid pads, until, at 1:52, a fiery rattle of an arpeggio synth line turns the placid waters inside out. Rather than playing with dynamics or harmonic structure, Oneohtrix focuses on timbre to build and release tension.
Snippets of traditional melodic beauty break in occasionally. However, they are sparse and in between, as Lopatin describes pop moments as “buried deep” within the music. Around 1:40 in “Still Life,” palatial vocal chords descend for a few seconds, sandwiched between ethereal sections of ominously haphazard synth stabs; it’s a gasp of air above the surface before suddenly dropping back below stormy waters.
The break in the middle at 2:55 recalls a hip hop sub bass drop, while the coda to “Chrome Country” brings to mind a church cathedral organ’s imposing majesty. These subtle references to a wide variety of genres and atmospheres can certainly be found, but he enshrouds them within thick layers of scatterbrained fog. I can only describe the feeling as a strangely familiar unfamiliarity.
In this sense, the album takes materiality as its focus: the concept of thought as physical, of sounds and moments as tangible. The unfamiliarity of the terrain may initially distance listeners unacquainted with experimental music. However, I would say patience is in order, the patience to habituate to worlds with which you’re unfamiliar.
After acclimating to the alien environment, listeners can appreciate the album’s constantly surprising moment-to-moment beauty, delightfully confusing you with strange feelings you may not have previously felt, like the sensation of listening to the sound of thoughts. Or something less weird.