by Alex Johnson (@thenamesabj)
Daniel Lopatin has had a pretty killer decade. Cementing himself as a pillar of electronic music as Oneohtrix Point Never, soundtracking two Sadfie brothers films, and working with some of the biggest names in pop music, few other artists have been able to conjure such ubiquitous support from fans, critics, and fellow musicians in their respective genre. So, how does someone in this position begin a new decade? For Lopatin, the answer is with an album that simultaneously wraps up the previous ten years while also pointing to new directions for the future.
Lopatin’s latest effort, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, revolves around the concept of the once mighty medium of radio. This is not only apparent sonically, but also through “Cross Talk” interludes which divide the album into four segments corresponding to different dayparts of radio programming. “Cross Talk I,” which opens the album, sets the stage nicely with an invitation (warning?): “this is the sound of morning.” This not only establishes the radio-inspired structure of the album, it also sets a slightly ominous tone. We can hear both a welcoming radio host and a hint at one of the main themes of the album: “this is the sound of mourning.”
Fear not, this isn’t a sad album, but it is certainly a mournful one. Like much of Lopatin’s work (particularly Eccojams and Garden of Delete), this album directs its focus towards a cultural moment and explores what looking back on that moment can tell us about the state of the world today. What have we learned since then? What have we lost since then? These are the questions one confronts when listening to Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. Like much of Lopatin’s best work, this album highlights the most poignant and touching aspects of the cultural moment it explores. We all occasionally find ourselves enthralled by something that's obviously somewhat bad, and Lopatin has an incredible knack for identifying what it is that’s so enthralling about something that is otherwise corny. Though throughout the album we seem to be witnessing the disintegration of the era of flipping through the radio dial, the moments in which Lopatin reminds us what that era had to offer—when he confronts nostalgia head on and embraces it—are blissful. What’s more impressive is that the moments on this album when Lopatin rips the comfort of nostalgia out from underneath the listener are somehow even better.
After “Cross Talk I,” Lopatin lays the sonic foundation for the album with “Auto & Allo” which flutters to life with bright synths that quickly dissolve into a more ambient passage dominating the first half of the song. The second half introduces more structure along with heavily-effected vocals from Lopatin, making this track a fitting introduction to the album as the ambient passages and pop structures that populate the rest of the album both appear here. Next comes the lead single, “Long Road Home,” where Lopatin fully embraces a pop sensibility. The song begins with majestic strings and vocal performances by Lopatin and Caroline Polachek—and though these vocals are once again bathed in effects, it's easily apparent how much the presence of Polachek helps add depth and dynamism to the track. Though it still sounds distinctly like Oneohtrix Point Never, it’s a full-blown pop song. What this song does exceptionally well is create the sense that we are wandering through an unknown place, but that it’s not all that bad. In fact, that’s the mood that both the more pop-oriented and the more ambient tracks on this album share, and it’s this mood that ultimately makes the album so cohesive—despite it’s structure which is meant to emulate flipping through radio stations.
After another interlude, we get a second pop song. “I Don’t Love Me Anymore” plays pretty much exactly like you’d expect a Oneohtrix Point Never take on pop-punk would sound, and illustrates an odd sense of optimism in the face of uncertainty both through it’s instrumentation and through it’s lyrics. “Maybe next year we’ll implode. Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?” This song, along with the other attempts at pop on the album, only gets better as the listener spends more time with it.
After this intense indulgence of two pop songs separated by a short interlude, the same themes are echoed in a more ambient passage of the album. “Bow Ecco,” probably the most underwhelming ambient track on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, finds Lopatin in familiar territory, meditating on one loop by adding layers of delay and creating rich textures. Even though it’s not the most compelling track, it does a spectacular job of transitioning the listener from the pop excesses of “Long Road Home” and “I Don’t Love Me Anymore” to the more contemplative mood of the next track, “The Whether Channel.” I’ll be honest, if someone would’ve played me the beginning of this track and told me it was the background music for the weather app on the Wii I would’ve believed them. As the song develops, it becomes more and more complex. The same sense of wandering demonstrated on earlier tracks is present here, evoking the experience of feeling one’s way through a dark cave by the sense of touch alone. As more elements are layered on top of one another, the listener can feel their vision begin to adjust and the enormity and beauty of the cave comes into focus. The wandering we’ve been engaged in thus far on the album begins to lead us somewhere, and then, in the last two minutes of the track we get a glimpse into the future. An appearance from rapper NOLANBEROLLIN may seem out of place on a Oneohtrix Point Never album, but his monotone delivery works beautifully as a template for Lopatin to create one of the most grandiose moments on the album. Furthermore, incredibly evocative lines like “blue skyline it’s a monsoon” are juxtaposed against lines that can’t help but make you smile, such as “bands on me I’m a raccoon” or “she gon’ get nutty for the cashew.” It perfectly matches the sort of tongue-in-cheek humor an artist like Lopatin has to embrace when making music that can so easily devolve into being overly-pretentious. This suite concludes with “No Nightmares” featuring The Weeknd, and, while the instrumentation and vocals are beautiful, it's more difficult to fully understand how this song fits in with the rest of the album. Maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The third (and probably best) suite opens with “Tales From the Trash Stratum” in which the music begins to wander again. While sonically not dissimilar from the ambient passage of “The Whether Channel,” “Tales From The Trash Stratum” introduces some noisier elements reminiscent of Garden of Delete. Even though we’re still searching at this point, it is becoming more and more clear that the structures, whether musical, cultural, or otherwise, that we clung to are disintegrating all around us. As he has before, Lopatin reminds us that we can sift through the debris of what has been destroyed and create something new, perhaps something better. The next track, “Answering Machine,” feels like inter-dimensional travel and serves as a pathway to something better, taking us from the Trash Stratum to an ornate concert hall where we have been sent to mourn. In this concert hall, we hear “Imago.” After introducing the loop which dominates most of the song, more noise begins to creep in, the loop begins to decay, and finally sublime strings enter the picture. This feels like the climax of the album and will go down as one of the most touching moments in Lopatin’s catalogue, perfectly encapsulating the promise that, from death, something beautiful can emerge.
After the final (and creepiest) Cross Talk track, the final suite opens with the final pop song of the album. “Lost but Never Alone” reflects the shift towards a more somber tone as the album comes to a close, but then, at the end of the song, we get a mind-melting guitar solo reminiscent of the solos on Kanye’s “Hold My Liquor” or “Devil in a New Dress.” The solo provides a sense of frustration and release, there’s a tension as we transition from one phase of our lives to the next that is perfectly embodied in this moment on the album.
After “Shifting” and “Wave Idea,” two more ambient tracks that reinforce many of the themes from earlier in the album, we get the finale, “Nothing’s Special.” This track not only ties up the album quite nicely, but, almost by proxy, it ties up Daniel Lopatin’s decade quite nicely. The whole album plays like a retrospective of his work over the last ten years. The noise of Garden of Delete, the loops from Returnal, Replica, and R Plus Seven, the nostalgia of Eccojams, and the explorations into vocals and lyrics of Age Of all make appearances on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. It’s a brilliant album that captures the most captivating elements of Lopatin’s career thus far while also making significant contributions of its own. And despite this album simultaneously imitating changing radio stations, drawing sounds from his entire catalogue, and constantly adumbrating between a sense of clarity and a sense of confusion, it’s shockingly cohesive.
Beyond that, this album so perfectly identifies a sense of hope within despair—but without ignoring the despair. It’s true, many of the things we clung to, that provided us a sense of security and well-being, are dissipating. What this album shows us is that, at least in the realm of art, from the ashes of what used to be can come something even more breathtaking and through that, suggests maybe that can happen outside the realm of art as well.