ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

Drawing on once-ubiquitous digital sample packs from the turn of the millennium, Daniel Lopatin's latest album is a wonderland of decay.
Delen

In July 2021, a trove of sample libraries from the turn of the millennium disappeared from the Internet Archive, a site dedicated to preserving webpages and cultural artefacts online. Throughout the '90s and '00s, these sample packs seeded themselves into the soundtracks of television shows (X-Files), video games (Silent Hill, Majora's Mask), movies (The Fifth Element), corporate videos, and ads. Listen to someone play these diffuse, atmospheric synth loops file by file and their generic familiarity might be overwhelming. You've almost certainly heard them before, even if you have no idea where. They've just always been there, hanging in the fog of indeterminate memory.

Daniel Lopatin, who since 2007 has recorded as Oneohtrix Point Never, once bookmarked this collection of futuristic digital patches and instrumental clips, intending to fold it into a future project. But his plans were stymied when a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown led to the sudden removal of these samples. After the release of his 2023 album Again, the New York-based artist encountered the same library once more. This time, it had been restored by users who recognised its historical value.

His latest offering, Tranquilizer, uses these vanished and reemerged samples to reflect on an era defined by glut and ephemerality. There is so much stuff on the internet right now, and so much of it is trickling away all the time. Moved by the pathos of people's misplaced faith in "the internet" as a stable and continuous institution, the Mercury Prize-nominated act composed the album using a rudimentary sample browsing program called Sononym.

Many of the breezy instruments on Tranquilizer are the sonic equivalents of pleasant, botanical wallpaper. Inspiration for the album came, in part, from ceiling tiles designed to look like a tropical sky at the dentist's office. By collaging clips, like a sedate flute synth or a babbling hand drum, from the sample library's massive databanks, Lopatin renders immersive ambient and new age that ranges from beatific (the gently twinkling "Cherry Blue") to prickly and menacing (the title track's slow lurch, which recalls GAS's 1996 ambient techno debut). It all sounds needlingly familiar, like the idyllic synthesisers used on an old PBS show designed to teach kids about science.

A former archival science student, Lopatin is a seasoned appropriator of discarded sounds. "If there were a Ten Commandments of OPN, one would be "Thou Shalt Not Exclude the Ugly and Banal," he recently told Tone Glow. His 2011 breakthrough, Replica, moulded clips from '80s TV commercials into probing, curious ambient sequences that dragged advertising's attention-stealing tactics away from their purchase-driving origin.

Tranquilizer doubles back to that album's strategy, but often takes an even more muted approach. The amount of negative space in the new age "Storm Show" or the pensive, jazzy "Waterfalls" draws careful attention to each sound that burbles through the dark. If Lopatin's recent albums wowed with their density, Tranquilizer highlights the preciousness of its constituent parts by making it sound like they might flit away at any second. Its tragicomic movements are full of pearly bells, cascading harp and digital drones that hint at their former utility as fragments of commercial audio kits. Now orphaned and scattered across a media landscape that has little use for them, they still retain memory of their original context.

Throughout the album, refuse that might have been pruned away from more conventional downtempo instead dances across the stage in a leading role. On "D.I.S.," one of 2004's most viscerally annoying noises, the stuttering static that cell phones used to send through nearby speakers when they received an incoming text, is transmuted into the spine of a gorgeous arpeggiated fractal. "Fear of Symmetry"'s wayward clicks and bleeps turn into detailed microbeats, reminiscent of Jan Jelinek's minimal techno. With the humid and fluttering "Lifeworld," Lopatin layers syncopated bongos with trilling flutes and stargazing pads. As an avalanche of synths floods the mix, the cheery sounds of Y2K worldbeat optimism seem to crumble beneath the unspooling dread of the current day.

What happens when simulations endure longer than the actual experiences they echo? That's a question that has long informed Lopatin's productions. One of Tranquilizer's most dynamic tracks, "Rodl Glide," bursts from low-key muzak into the kind of clunky, walloping, acid house-lite beats and Eurodance synth stabs that Saturday Night Live might have used to soundtrack a skit in the early aughts. By reinvigorating these musical building blocks with his playful compositional sensibilities, Lopatin adds another bend to the long road the sounds have travelled into the present day. Tranquilizer takes solace in the idea that even the flimsiest copies of a past life can incubate some life of their own, if only we stop to breathe it into them.

Sasha Geffen (Resident Advisor)