Daniel Lopatin is known both for his prolific output and his fondness for '80s synth. His latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never is a peculiar creature. For one, it displays a slight shift towards narrative, as compared to his earlier more conventionally ambient works. The samples from this album are sourced largely from television commercials from the 1980s. Not wholly surprising, but definitely peculiar given that the songs that result sound organic in spite of the relentless manipulation that is occurring. The manufactured sounds of television culture become kind of naturalised through abstraction. It's a very peculiar album because it swings from the achingly beautiful and alien--such as the title track featuring a Budd-and-Eno-esque piano line that is slowly submerged in electronic beeps and groans and Low-era-Bowie-esque buzz before emerging again only to be once more submerged--through to wildcat growls, Street Fighter-ish grunts, tribal chants, cringe-worthy choral lines and breathy new age cawing, isolated syllables repeated ad nauseam and so on and so forth...all cushioned by a plane of ambient drone. Peculiar, indeed.


(Posted on 12/12/11)