A reliquary is a place where the past is sealed away and stored. But the past isn't a place that Daniel Lopatin ever seems to easily position in his music when he works under his Oneohtrix Point Never guise (his other projects are a different story). He may use it as a reference point, as with his emulation of the vintage Fairlight cut-ups favored by the Art of Noise included on last year's Replica, but OPN's material mostly feels like a slow, untethered drift into a tentative future. Music For Reliquary House, his half of this split LP with fellow celebrator of change and lover of pseudonyms Jeff Witscher, aka Rene Hell, is taken from an installation/performance piece conducted by Lopatin and video artist Nate Boyce. It's coarse and challenging, a serrated edge severed into a once-placid template. Hell picks up the thread with his side, In 1980 I Was a Blue Square, which begins in conflict and ends in a form of serene resolution.
Music For Reliquary House is a logical extension of the path traveled by Replica, and it pushes those ideas to extremes. A noise resembling a circular saw slashing through metal punctures the "Stone of Spiritual Understanding", while high-pitched frequencies reminiscent of Aphex Twin's piercing "Ventolin" make "Free Ride" a genuinely distressing listen. "The Letter" sounds like Lopatin's hard drive attempting to turn itself inside out, edging close to the collapse-of-civilization vibe of "Nil Admirari" from Returnal. This resembles a staging area in which new OPN ideas may be tested out rather than a potential future direction, but that doesn't invalidate the material. The first half of the wonderful "Midday" feels like someone just opened up a box full of manic chatter, letting it flood out into the world in a burst of expression before a familiar wave of ambience ties it down to a loose structure.
Structure is something Rene Hell brings once the baton is passed. A looped piano roll opens his side, living up to his promise of making something partially influenced by "mid 20th century classical music." Bursts of willful antagonism zoom into sporadic focus throughout In 1980 I Was a Blue Square, neatly tying it to what came before. A festering glitch rises up around those piano rolls on "Meta Concrete"; "The Bridge" veers close to complete disintegration. But Hell's central role, in the unlikely event that these two artists mapped this out conceptually, is to provide a dose of introspection following the ragged disemboweling provided by OPN. "Qi" is a doleful elegy stretched out over six minutes, forming one part oppressive death march, one part tilt up toward the sky. That's indicative of Hell's work here, providing a big mesh of emotional and stylistic contrasts, helping add to the general feel of being pushed and pulled in multiple directions at the same time.
Lopatin says his material on Music For Reliquary House is "a series of hallucinatory informatic assaults" inspired by the modernist sculptures of David Smith, Anthony Caro, Isamu Noguchi, and Tony Smith. It's reminiscent of Stereolab's 1995 collaboration with artist Charles Long, Music For the Amorphous Body Study Center. It's a similar musical digression, pulling on fibers of already extant ideas, taking them to a place ill-suited to the traditional album format. So it's appropriate that Lopatin decided to release it this way, re-tooling the tracks following a multimedia performance of his work with Boyce at the MoMA in December last year, then gelling them with the work of another artist similarly active in underground circles. For Lopatin and Hell, it purposefully muddies the intent behind work that already leaves a wildly disorienting imprint, that accrues an unusual type of weight by positioning outright hostility right on top of humor, anger, and tranquility.
