It makes perfect sense that Oneohtrix Point Never's brilliant Replica would have a remix addendum. That 2011 album by producer Daniel Lopatin was a small masterpiece, one of the few albums of experimental music that both defined a new sonic space and was accessible enough to appeal to listeners with only so much time for musical abstraction. It's tempting to call it a leap forward for Lopatin, but probably more accurate to think of it as a snapshot from an artist unconcerned with linear movement. It was a place, not the place, and there was nothing inevitable about it. And now, a year later, OPN returns with a brief four-song EP of remixes and reworks of a few of Replica's tracks. Since the original album was highly modular, the compositions built and transformed from discrete parts you could also admire in isolation, turning these elements over to others to arrange as they see fit is a worthwhile experiment.
For Matmos, who re-work the title track with contributions on vocals and viola from experimental composer Limpe Fuchs, that means shuffling Lopatin's sound fragments into a bed of their own idiosyncratic way with rhythm. Electronic music has long been split in factions that can be traced back to academia and factions that can be traced back to the club; Matmos' music, while never fully of either world, always finds a way to incorporate both. Their distinctive ear for beats, with tracks built around a pulse that could come from no one else, is their defining quality. Their version of "Replica" feels simultaneously awkward and precise, a Books-like neo-classical tumble through piano riffs and voices and string plucks. Since the general tone of Replica leans toward heady and serious, their lighter run highlights some of the more playful and wistful ends of Lopatin's sound world. The second track, Lopatin's edit of "Replica", which includes vocals by King Midas Sound's Roger Robinson, brings to mind Antony's version of "Returnal", where an instrumental was stripped down to its essence and revealed to be a bed for a proper song. As Robinson sings it, "Replica" sounds like an austere ballad from the post-rock 90s-- something from Gastr del Soul's Camoufleur, say-- something both chilly and intellectual but also seeded with mystery and emotion.
Less interesting are the two pieces on the back half. Surgeon turns the vocal-laden drone "Remember" into a thick but ultimately anonymous bit of industrial techno. His sources seem as if they could have come from anywhere, and the relationship of the remix to the original is unclear. Richard Youngs has an even more difficult task taking on the astonishing memory painting "Nassau", and his radical re-work is interesting if ultimately not particularly memorable. Jettisoning the delicate and careful construction of the original, he more or less compresses the individual sounds into a ball of noise and moves it around the space in orbit of a wailing vocal incantation. It's not intense enough to be overpowering and the structure is too loose and the track too short to admire how it unfolds. So, two tracks you might play again, two tracks you probably won't. These four pieces, taken together, are a nice demonstration of the malleable nature of Lopatin's recent work, and if nothing else they'll have you hearing the originals in a slightly different way.
