Everyone who reads about music has a list of descriptors made meaningless by overuse. "Hazy" (rhymes with "lazy") is right up there for me, but another that makes me wince though I've used it myself dozens of times over the years is "cinematic." It's the term we reach for with instrumental music because movies are where we first learned about the emotional impact of abstract sound. If we'd have grown up in the silent era, we'd be leaning on different adjectives, but given our level of "moving image + instrumental music" saturation, "cinematic" is what comes to mind. Fair enough. In the past, the music of Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of the busy producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- fit this term. Albums like the Rifts collection and 2010's Returnal had drones and moods and thematic shifts that hinted at some kind of on-screen drama. And Lopatin has said that he's been influenced by film music and would love to work on movie scores. But the new OPN album, Replica, which also happens to be Lopatin's best work to date by far, is coming from somewhere else. This is music that exists independently, each track a tiny universe with its own cracked logic.
A few people have mentioned the Books to me in reference to this album, and the comparison holds water. It's not that Replica sounds anything like the Books-- though it uses tight loops of sampled voices, the voices exist to convey texture rather than language-- but Lopatin shares with them a fresh ear that creates an uncanny sense of wonder in the music. Also like the Books, Replica puts a premium on silence; just as important as all the odd, hard-to-place sounds is the space that frames it. And the combination of unusual textures and all the room, plus the way the music seems unbound to any particular era or aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel playful. The music is by turns dark, ethereal, frightening, and silly, but regardless, it carries in it a feeling of joy. There's a real sense of discovery here, or possibilities being probed, and that feeling is infectious. You can hear the person making it getting deep into what these sonic elements could mean, and he's bringing us down into this fantastic place with him.
Aside from the intricate production detail, what's most striking about Replica is how well-constructed these tracks are, which is especially impressive given the record's brevity (the first nine average less than four minutes each). Each has an arc and the music is constantly changing, but the tracks go into unexpected places. The opening "Andro" starts with a lonely, distant synth tone and fuzzy layers of robo-voices before becoming overtaken by noisy samples and, eventually, an explosion of percussion from what sounds like a a digital jungle. "Sleep Dealer" starts off like a pop version of a Steve Reich tape piece, zeroing in on percussive phonetic ticks and a loop of a human sigh, but it gradually resolves itself in an almost geometric way, as the relationship between the various samples snaps into focus just before the ending. The title track pulls us out of the machine by starting with a simple piano figure and then folding in bits of synth and finally a buzzing drone, becoming something alien and foreboding after starting so warm and melancholy. Lopatin doesn't just introduce sounds, add loops, and fade out; his pieces move, tripping from one place to somewhere far away over the course of just a few minutes.
A couple of tracks, like "Submersible" and "Remember", come closer to the pure synth drone work that marked earlier OPN material, but even these are full of weird surprises, like the distorted and warbly vocal loop at the tail end of "Remember" that manages to sound like a field recording of some ancient religious rite, even though it's probably something like a processed syllable taken from a life insurance advertisement. "Remember", like the album as a whole, feels peculiar and just out of reach, and it makes me realize how hard it is these days to find music imbued with genuine mystery. A huge part of the fun with this record is that these sonic miniatures are truly puzzling even as they remain accessible and highly musical; Replica is "experimental" music that also feels open, and somehow, despite coming out of two speakers like all my other records, it manages to feel participatory. I can feel myself filling in space and making connections as I listen.
Most film music is functional and is meant to reinforce images and amplify what's happening in the story. It is manipulative by design, serving to bend the affect of the viewer in accordance with the director's wishes. These 10 tracks are packed with detail and rich with feeling, but they are also, to a strange degree, devoid of manipulation. Even though they're uniformly stirring, they don't point you in any direction in particular, and you could see each listener creating his or her own meaning. Instead of pushing, they serve mostly to draw you closer and remind you of the power of sound as sound. Lopatin may have used samples from 1980s commercials to create many of these tracks, but Replica doesn't use nostalgia as an end in itself. This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.
