Daniel Lopatin aka
Oneohtrix Point Never is a true favorite of mine. He makes some of the most mind-blowingly beautiful, brilliant music I have heard in years. Awhile back I was stuck in a place where the only escape was internally--into your own mind--memories, reflections, imagination, creativity and meditation . While there, I got the first (official) Oneohtrix album,
Rifts, and all of the sudden I had a portal to a special meditative state of oblivion. The spiraling, interlocking keyboards are intensely entrancing. His music offers engaging, complex webs of sound that can be listened to as intently as you would like but are simultaneously hypnotizing to the point that you can just relax and lose yourself in them. Quickly after that he released
Returnal,which introduced quite a bit more song structure but was equally excellent, if not better. The
title track is a transcendent piece of songwriting that incorporates his own pitch-shifted vocals (don't say it sounds like the Knife/Fever Ray...they're great and all but don't touch the pathos and desolation captured here). The emotional nature and excellent songwriting of "Returnal" was caste in stark relief in the
remix (mp3), featuring Antony Hegarty, that stripped the song down to piano and Antony's heartbreaking vocals.
Lopatin has released a ton of VERY diverse material under many different names (Games, Ford & Lopatin, Chuck Person, KGB Man, Sunsetcorp--check back soon for more of his amazing music), but his next official Oneohtrix Point Never album
Replica drops November 8th. I'm pretty excited and that excitement is only heightened by the first single "Sleep Dealer" (a song title that truly speaks to me--I have a pretty intense love for sleep). The album is "an electronic song cycle based around lo-fi audio procured from television advertisement compilations." How that sounds on "Sleep Dealer" is chopped and looped samples that shouldn't work together but do after about 20 seconds, backed by beautiful drones. When what seems like a chorus of voices comes in, the whole thing morphs into a new level of beauty. It reminds quite a bit of
Oval or
Fennesz who have made some of the most stunning ambient music of all time. Good company to be in. Check it out below.
Oneohtrix Point Never - Sleep Dealer.mp3
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