A decade and a half ago, Daniel Lopatin shelled out what might be the best hundred bucks he ever spent. On the internet, he’d come across a guy selling bootleg DVD compilations of decades-old TV commercials culled from Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime soaps, and late-night cable: Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Hershey’s chocolate bars, Heinz Alphagetti. Dated, kitschy stuff, thick with chintzy synths and VHS buzz. For someone like Lopatin, obsessed with the cultural detritus of the late 20th century, this was manna. He snapped up a handful of discs, ripped the audio without so much as watching them, and loaded the choicest bits into his sampler. The results became Replica, a tangled suite of ambient-expressionist fugues—ethereal, elegiac, unsettling—that constitutes one of the finest pieces of electronic music of the new millennium.
The origins of Tranquilizer, Lopatin’s new album under his Oneohtrix Point Never alias, are strikingly similar. This time, it’s rooted in a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin found on the Internet Archive in the early 2020s. He bookmarked the page with the vague intention of using them in a future project; then they disappeared, presumed casualties of a DMCA takedown notice, and he moved on. When the files unexpectedly turned up again, the archive’s very impermanence became a newfound part of its appeal. “It occurred to me that even that—the disappearing and resurfacing—was something I wanted to capture,” he said. “I wanted to capture the emotional register of an era where everything is archived but perpetually slipping away.”
This isn’t new territory for Lopatin. His 2020 album Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, which was rooted in another audio archive he discovered online, took as its central conceit the “format flips” that occur when radio stations change from, say, golden oldies to commercial country. He framed 2023’s Again as a conversation between his contemporary and younger selves, as a way of interrogating the slipperiness of taste and memory. But Tranquilizer feels less explicitly conceptual than either of those albums (to say nothing of the esoteric Age Of or the abrasive Garden of Delete, with its elaborate origin story about humanoid aliens and a made-up “hypergrunge” band, complete with backdated blog posts, fictional Twitter accounts, and other assorted digital marginalia).
Like Replica, the new album swims in uneasy waters—a murky confluence of new-age synths; IMAX-grade bass swells; orphaned snippets of strings, flute, and other acoustic instruments; and juddering, accidental rhythms spawned from clumsily truncated percussive loops. But the provenance of the album’s sources is never the principal focus. Sample libraries are overwhelmingly functional tools, often tailored toward specific uses like orchestral film scores or big-room EDM, yet Lopatin appears less interested than usual in investigating the cultural codes inherent in specific eras or subgenres; instead, he seems to be working largely intuitively, motivated by the sheer expressive potential of his sounds. Perhaps as a result, Tranquilizer is the most immediately pleasurable Oneohtrix Point Never album in some time.
The album opens with the sound of wind, followed by faint chimes and the languid strum of 12-string guitar. “For residue,” announces a gurgling, pitched-down voice—the only recognizable words on the album. (I like to think it’s Lopatin’s celebratory toast to remnants of the past.) Digital pads flare up; a chorus of synthetic voices rises from deep in the mix, accompanied by what might be seagulls, or crying babies. The mood is mysterious, expectant; the arrangement moves like weather, flowing straight into the next track’s cottony clouds of tone and flickering, arrhythmic pulses, which give way to a dazzling array of sounds and events—piano, harp, cinematic strings, jingling bells, plucked double bass, creaking doors, and what might be dog barks, or maybe just a bow bouncing against a cello. In the next track, “Lifeworld,” scattered percussion brings to mind infinite monkeys clacking away on infinite typewriters before a colorful surge of easy-listening bliss bursts like a soft-boiled egg—a gooily ecstatic explosion that recalls the beatific swirl of the Avalanches’ Since I Left You, rendered in OPN’s characteristically chaotic, elusive terms.
It’s all too active to be considered ambient, and too erratic to resemble conventional song form, but also catchier than what’s typically filed under “experimental.” With rare exceptions, these are not particularly representational sounds, and even when they are, they’ve been severed from context. They simply wash over you in waves. Something about the music’s unpredictability makes it difficult to parse on a conscious level, and the same could be said for its density—the abundance is staggering. There are far more elements in play than you could easily identify or tally, and they are changing all the time, coming and going, sometimes falling into repeating patterns and sometimes simply evaporating. Yet Tranquilizer, in keeping with the chill connotations of its title, rarely feels difficult or daunting or abrasive, and never winkingly clever or self-consciously premeditated. Even at its most unpredictable, it carries you along in its flow. Its arrangements feel musical—that is, speaking fluently, compellingly, in a grammar of tone and pulse—even when you’d be hard pressed to describe any of it in standardized terms of melody, harmony, or rhythm.
Tranquilizer is less melancholy than you might expect from an album inspired by the idea that the cultural objects that represent our past and constitute our identities could disappear without warning. It can be wistful—just consider the limpid pianos of “Cherry Blue,” which feels almost like a Cocteau Twins homage, right down to its title; or the pulsing chimes and distant cries of “Modern Lust,” which cradles a snippet of muted jazz trumpet like some precious cargo—and it can be surprisingly graceful, given the sensory overload of its slow-motion firehose of sounds and stimuli. But in tone and mood, the album stays nimble, at least beneath its generally contemplative umbrella, taking in the sci-fi synth-scapes of “Measuring Ruins,” the Jon Hassell-does-Weather Channel funk of “Fear of Symmetry,” the elastic ambient trance of highlight “D.I.S.”
There’s humor here as well, particularly toward the end: “Rodl Glide,” the album’s penultimate track, begins with three minutes of ghostly, slow-motion R&B before abruptly unleashing a cascade of garish rave stabs and lush Detroit techno chords—a 90-second detour that may have you wondering if some other artist has hijacked your playlist. It’s the rare moment when Lopatin offers us a glimpse of fully formed musical readymades that have come from beyond the limits of his own invented universe. The winking denouement of the closing “Waterfalls” further blurs the line between his world and ours: rushing rainsticks, jazz-fusion soprano sax, Private Music mallet arps, harpsichord, even a burst of tabla. Here at the end of an album ostensibly about the precarity of the cultural commons, Lopatin sounds the opposite of worried. He sounds unburdened. Grabbing hold of what he can, while he can, he sounds like he’s having a blast.
