There’s a continual tension in experimental electronic music between developing and owning a particular sound and exploring new ones. Creating a unique identity is difficult, and sometimes breaking out of it once it's been established is even harder. Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never is an artist working at one end of this spectrum. He’s restless, searching for new terrain, and his more recent full-lengths have found him reinventing himself with each new record. R Plus Seven, the follow-up to 2011’s Replica, sounds little like previous OPN releases. But despite the radical shifts—and this is what makes this project so consistently rewarding—you can still hear him in it; there are bedrock approaches and clear musical values that you can pick out as Lopatin.
The general approach on R Plus Seven is to build new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early age of personal computing. The aesthetic is identifiably “’80s,” but it’s not the ’80s of new wave, with its familiar array of synthesizers. Instead, Lopatin focuses on the hauntingly clean and clear pre-set sounds that were available for early, crude digital music production (and which were often used in commercial applications, from bumpers for local PBS shows to soundtracking instructional videos) and adds the kind of short-burst bits of information that were common when a sampler could hold two or three seconds of 8-bit audio. While this sort of throwback is common in electronic music, for Lopatin it serves a purpose beyond reference. R Plus Seven is aware of how music and textures like this are likely to be received, but it plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer.
There’s a weird kind of innocence in this sound palette. The fake horns and whooshing vocal samples evoke a time when “the computer” as a concept was still very much rooted in the future rather than the present. The chintzy approximations of common instruments contain a sort of implicit critique of the idea that technology will save us all, but Lopatin’s music doesn’t get hung up on irony, even though it's definitely in the mix. It’s this quality, of highlighting the vacuous side of this music while simultaneously embracing its humor and poignancy, that elevates the OPN project to another plane.
Along those lines, during my first few listens to R Plus Seven, it was hard not to think of James Ferraro’s recent work in this area, specifically his album Far Side Virtual, which used the impossibly cheerful and polished sound of early digital culture to emphasize the music’s connection to mindless, friction-free commerce. To Ferraro’s credit, he’s kept a poker face when presenting this music, and you never quite knew where he was coming from, which made the listening experience fraught with ambiguity and anxiety. But Lopatin comes at it from another angle. He wants his music to do things that music is traditionally known to do: change, develop, use melody to convey feelings, build tension and then release it. That all of this happens within such tightly controlled parameters makes the fact that the record is emotionally engaging that much more impressive. Common sonic threads include wispy digitized voices on tracks like “Americans” and “Chrome Country” that bring to mind the then-exotic turn-of-the-’80s sound of the Fairlight synthesizer, an early sampling device, along with many brittle digital versions of sounds that are distantly “exotic,” conveying the feel of a blocky pixilated representation of a jungle or beach scenes.
Indeed, with “Americans” and “Inside World”, the album makes sharp use of contrasts between the real and the virtual, between “natural” and the representation of natural. I’m tempted to call it Fifth World Music in homage to the 1980 Jon Hassell/Brian Eno album Fourth World: Possible Musics, a record that has a clear spiritual connection to this one. Hassell and Eno hoped to filter ancient tribal sounds through the sound of technology to create an alien but distantly familiar landscape (their project generated discussion about clumsy wording and potentially problematic ideas of what constituted “primitive” music, but that’s a subject for another time). Lopatin grapples with some of those ideas of decontextualization and colliding worlds, but the meeting place is closer to a tableau from Second Life, providing another layer of disorientation.
Still, I can’t underscore strongly enough that, as with Replica, all of this takes place in a realm where musicality is paramount. You don’t listen to this record thinking about theory; it’s beautiful stuff, with chords and tunes and sections you remember. And it also draws from more sounds and eras than I’ve given it credit for. Opening track “Boring Angel” seems a tribute to the glorious repetition of Terry Riley’s process music, while “Along” and “Cryo” are closer to the mood and structure of that place where late-’90s IDM sounds met the winding structures of post-rock. R Plus Seven doesn’t have quite the disembodied weirdness of Replica, but it’s no less accomplished, another intriguing chapter from an artist whose work remains alive with possibility.
