It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that composer Daniel Lopatin pulls off under the ever-shifting guise of Oneohtrix Point Never. From his early days of programming minimal, evocative vistas of synthesizer dystopia to his newer interests in the gnarly, Kornier sides of our culture, Lopatin has managed to reinterpret his own vision time and time again without losing the essential, prickly feeling one gets from listening to his music. At the heart of all the uncanny manipulation of sound is a concept of the individual — disenchanted yet wide-eyed, obsessed with the psychedelic while hopelessly plugged into the minutiae of the day-to-day, the kind of mind that is restless even when surrounded by the dewiest, most calming of new-age tones. It’s ambient music made for headbanging, both frustrated and perverted and drenched in a nostalgia that always manages to keep its gaze toward the future. For all of the formalist structure that Lopatin imposes over his own chopped-up aesthetic, what he taps into in his work reaches beyond the realm of critique; it is a spiritual music of the self, relentlessly undergoing transformation, and attempting to discern exactly what it is.
