For fans of drone-heavy psychedelia, these are bountiful times. Emeralds, Tim Hecker, Kevin Drumm, Gavin Russom, Ben Frost, Black to Comm, and Oneohtrix Point Never are among a current wave of artists synthesizing their way to a kind of liquid nirvana, sculpting music into impossible shapes right there in the air between your speakers. Oneohtrix Point Never is the alias of Daniel Lopatin, a Brooklyn musician whose tarnished sci-fi yearnings are evident in his titles-- "Betrayed in the Octagon", "Transmat Memories", "Laser to Laser", "Hyperdawn"-- and in his penchant for sad, sourly tuned analog synthesizers. Oneohtrix Point Never's music is in love with technology but finds it nevertheless a source of sadness, anxiety, and gleaming fatigue, as well as redemption.
Last year, his album Rifts collected two and a half hours of previously released material-- the albums Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind, plus selections from various CD-R and cassette releases-- that added up to a remarkably singular vision. Returnal is much more compact, only eight tracks in 40 minutes; by design, it's more focused, sounding mostly like a set of music created with a specific set of instruments in a concentrated span. But it goes further than Rifts. It's denser and more complex. The clear 16th-note arpeggios that drive so many Oneohtrix Point Never tracks, when they appear at all, have been layered and blurred to the point of losing their definition. There's plenty in the swarming sound to compare to Emeralds' recent album Does It Look Like I'm Here?, which was also released by Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego label.
The album begins with a chaos that's uncharacteristic for Oneohtrix Point Never-- a wailing voice, feedback squeal, synthesizer drones, and overdriven drum blasts combust like a rocket on its launch pad. The track, "Nil Admirari", is an unexpected invocation of noise music, and also the only cut of its kind on the album. (It's not hard to see Rehberg's confrontational touch behind its sequencing.) In contrast, "Describing Bodies" is comparable to the ethereal shimmer of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. It emerges into earshot like a shape in the fog: A densely layered bed of strings supports a meandering synthesizer melody, but whatever motion is in the notes is all but swallowed up by the mass. "Stress Waves" is caught somewhere between the pulsing cycles of 60s minimalism and the untethered drift of Berlin's Chain Reaction label. It's gorgeous, heartbreaking even, but abstracted in a way that keeps it from tipping into the maudlin.
Elsewhere, the arpeggios familiar from Rifts and Zones Without People return on the title track. It's a nostalgic sound, drenched in retro-futurist melancholy, conjuring a nightclub of the near future as it might have been imagined by some straight-to-VHS movie from the early 1980s. After the agonized atomic blast of "Nil Admirari", this is the record's other big surprise. Electronically processed and harmonized vocals lend it a palpably pop touch; throw a kinetic minimal techno rhythm underneath it, and it might be the Knife. "Ouroboros" is Lopatin at his sweetest, with keening synthesizer melodies not so far removed from something Boards of Canada might make; beatless, it moves with a rare, stately grace.
And then "Preyouandi", the closing track, takes the album subtly somewhere else. The slow, blurred synthesizers are of a piece with most of the album; muted, incidental vocals feature the same processing as the voice on "Returnal". But the soundfield rattles with percussion and delay, a glitchy rumble reminiscent of Vladislav Delay at his most dissipated. Paired with the opening "Nil Admirari" it bookends the record in percussion, something not often heard in Oneohtrix Point Never records-- and rarely heard quite this way.
You could call this ambient music, or Kosmische; it's certainly indebted to Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. But it also sounds unusually original, which is a word you don't get to use so often. I'm tempted to say that it's an unusually tactile music, as though you could hear Lopatin feeling his way across the surfaces of his machines. (It is, without a doubt, incredibly sensuous music.) But I'm not sure that that's true, either, given the way the sounds so often seem to materialize out of thin air. Having softened his attacks and smeared his notes into indefinite shapes, he seems to sever the music from any kind of causality, so that it simply floats freely, morphing, rippling in a dance of infinite regeneration, like some perfect lifeform.
