In E.M. Forster’s near prophetic The Machine Stops we are warned of a moment when machines start accessing us. Oneohtrix Point Never breaches this ‘interfacing’ fault line. The sound – born out of reductive binary, 1 and 0, On and Off – is structured to form complex patterns that consume the listener. Despite the limited repertoire of the instruments, OPN points to infinite possibilities through mind-bending melodies.
The asynchronicity of the repeated layers make it difficult to distinguish when one starts and another stops. These affecting loops, far from being meditative, throw the listener off balance into a lucid dream world where perspective becomes skewed. As Forster notes, “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves.” Like Klaus Schulze before him OPN’s outlook is dystopian – Electronic music re-imagining reality.
Daniel Lopatin has been making music as Oneohtrix Point Never since 2007. Like his label mate Mark McGuire, Lopatin is industrious in the studio regularly releasing new material.
Although his early releases were on cassette Lopatin is no Luddite. Marginalised by the format, the re-emergence of arcane technologies allowed the music to exist as a counterculture.
Far from endorsing the extremes of noise, Lopatin opted to employ similar techniques, albeit sending the music in the opposite direction. Creating beauty rather than brutality.
Words by Samuel Breen
Where: Boston, USA
What: Arpeggiated synth loops, layered
Unique Fact: The name is a play on local radio station 106.7
Get 3 songs: ‘Laser To Laser’, ‘The Returnal (feat. Anthony Hegarty)’, ‘Hyperdawn’
