Oneohtrix Point Never

An organ chord. A single note, duplicated across several octaves, as if to saturate the sonic space as much as possible. It would seem like the very image of stillness. Yet slowly, almost reluctantly, the harmonics released begin to move, to sway, revealing that beneath that motionless surface lies shifting matter. The opening of "Boring Angel", the first track on "R Plus Seven", lasts barely a minute — but that's already enough to hint at a spark of wonder: a magic that refuses to be dismissed with belittling adjectives, a spiritual element that springs to life from the mundane at the very moment it seems about to be smothered by it.

From the synthetic drone an arpeggiator springs forth, a cascade of notes launched at dizzying speed, straight out of Tangerine Dream. Within its folds creep broken synthetic choirs, voices that sound human but aren't quite, that evoke someone's presence while at the same time denying it, dissolving it. A robotic stand-in for transcendence, unsettling yet strangely familiar. It stings a little, but it stirs up something profound.

Crystals of Fog

Daniel Lopatin arrives at "R Plus Seven" with an already solid reputation in experimental electronic music behind him. From 2010's Eccojams Vol. 1 — but really, looking closer, as far back as 2007's first "Betrayed In The Octagon" under the name Oneohtrix Point Never — his music had played an essential role in the birth of that constellation which Simon Reynolds had dubbed "hypnagogic", and which would go on to feed the vaporwave sound: slowed-down, degraded loops, fragments of pop and new age from the Eighties and Nineties spun in on themselves until they dissolved, distorted memories with no sharp edges, no center. The focus was on timbre and the treatment of the sample: sound as mass — or more often as cloud — to be shaped without ever forcing it into a form, letting it keep its amorphous, suspended, unresolved character.

With the project's sixth album, structure bursts into that world of clouds: recognisable melodies, rhythms, compositional architectures you can follow thread by thread. The attention never abandons the material quality of sound, but now pairs it with a far more articulate, at times labyrinthine compositional logic: a forward-looking gaze that isn't content just to dissolve, but wants to build too. An unexpected turn, but far from incoherent: the compulsive attention to the margins of sound remains the same, but those margins now trace a map — and the amorphous material crystallises into structures possessed of their own estranging beauty.

"R Plus Seven" is also the first album released on Warp, a label historically central to the most exploratory strains of electronic music — already home to Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus, Autechre, Squarepusher — and which in 1992 and 1994 had launched the "Artificial Intelligence" compilations, a manifesto for what would come to be called Intelligent Dance Music. Far from being a mere contractual detail, the label change is first and foremost a change of interlocutor, the sign of a realignment: no longer an experimentation proceeding by accumulation and drift, but the pursuit of more legible, layered, surprising forms, suited to a demanding audience willing to follow their every detail.

Philosophy in fragments

Lopatin's reputation had also been built on his ease with philosophical references. His interviews had drawn, like mosquitoes to a neon light, critics often better versed in contemporary currents of thought than in how musical language actually works, wrapping the artist in an aura of the theorist-artist holding dual citizenship between academia and the recording studio — in part, a rerun of what had happened decades earlier with Richard Pinhas, the mastermind behind Heldon and a pioneer of French progressive electronics, whose critical fortunes had depended not a little on his proximity to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Around the album's release, pressed by journalists, Lopatin would reel off connections to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology — hypermodern currents much discussed among connoisseurs, from which digital media artist Takeshi Murata also drew, one of whose pre-existing films serves as the video for "Problem Areas". Alongside these, interviews would also bring up the evergreen Jacques Derrida, the "Lacanian" filmmaker Manuel De Landa, and the social constructionism of science anthropologist Bruno Latour. A deliberately heterogeneous inventory, assembled without much concern for systematic coherence. Lopatin himself has described his relationship with philosophy as that of an image-scavenger rather than a systematic reader: scraps of thought, rereadings of concepts, are put into circulation the way one would a sample — decontextualised, recombined, made to resonate in a new setting.

And it's precisely on the level of sampling that lies an important key to the album, which, like its predecessors (though perhaps not quite to the same extent), builds its sonic world through a network of samples. Fragments distorted often to the point of unrecognisability, drawn from a handful of tracks that resurface at multiple points, creating hidden connections between the songs. "Zebra" and "Inside World" both sample Mark Isham's "Many Chinas" — released in 1983 on Windham Hill, the Californian new age label that made enveloping, abstract ambient music its trademark. "Inside World" also features excerpts from "Litany" by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who resurfaces again in "Cryo".

Raiding music of an entirely different stripe, "Still Life" cuts up and slows down vocal elements from Nicki Minaj — from "Whip It" and "Stupid Hoe", the latter also resurfacing in "Americans". "Chrome Country" contains a transfigured sample of "Only Time" by Enya, in which only the melodic outline remains recognisable, like a shape glimpsed through fogged glass. Through this work of extraction, digestion and reconfiguration, sounds that once shaped the imagery of commercial new age, screen-friendly ambient music or a screensaver aesthetic — Windows 95, Encarta, the sounds that accompanied early internet connections — are treated as fresh raw material: a vein hiding in plain sight yet presumed exhausted, in which something genuine can still be found, an overlooked mineral not yet used up by overuse and banality.

Among the many connections invoked by Lopatin, one in particular is illuminating. The link with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litérature Potentielle), the literary and artistic group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, which worked through formal constraints and playful recombinations. With a structuralist lightness that bet on the idea that the most arbitrary rules could yield the most fertile surprises, a wager that also drew in Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.

The album's very title is a statement of method: "R Plus Seven" is a direct reference to the Oulipian technique known as "N+7", which involves replacing every noun in a text with the seventh one that follows it in the dictionary. Here, though, N becomes R, staying true to another of Lopatin's arbitrary games, as — without ever explaining why — he chose to begin the titles of his previous four albums with the letter R.

But this recombinatory streak extends beyond the title. For every track, Lopatin wrote lyrics, which were then fed into speech-synthesis programs; the resulting audio outputs were sliced up and mapped chromatically onto a keyboard. Based on this mapping, the fragments emerge arbitrarily within the melody, so that the voices appear in the mix only in "oblique moments", as single isolated words. The booklet included with the album, however, prints the scripts in full — texts that, in their complete form, never actually exist in the listening experience.

Uncanny valley, arpeggios, pauses

The dematerialisation of the human voice — reduced to isolated phonemes, words torn from context, synthetic timbres that mimic its shape without giving back its warmth — intertwines with the record's timbral choices to converge on one precise effect: the so-called uncanny valley, the unease felt in the presence of an imitation of the human close enough to seem almost real, yet not quite convincing enough to actually be so.

Lopatin builds the feeling with precise tools. Abandoning the Roland Juno and the other hardware synths used on previous albums, the musician makes heavy use of the Spectrasonics Omnisphere software synthesizer, which among its many features includes a granular synthesis engine, allowing him to create cyborg timbres by nimbly breaking down any sound into tiny fragments and reassembling them in ways that radically alter their nature, while never completely abandoning a trace of what they once were. Voices and other sound sources thus become plastic material: stretched, sliced, mapped onto the keyboard until what was human and natural becomes inanimate, yet retains an unsettling memory of its biological origin.

VSTs (Virtual Studio Technology), software plugins that emulate physical instruments or generate their own sounds, add a further layer of controlled artificiality: Lopatin says he loves machines like the Fairlight CMI, Korg Wavestation and Korg M1 (whose organ sound is omnipresent throughout the tracks) for their "early and artificial" attempts to emulate real instruments, producing precisely the short circuit between familiarity and estrangement that runs through the entire record.

"Americans" opens on a loop of sampled natural noises — forest sounds, wind, environments that Mark Richardson on Pitchfork describes as "sterilized" images of jungles and beaches — immediately thrown into disarray by a clatter of digital elements and tinkling new age flourishes. Then a synthetic choir enters, its pitch gradually dropping and fragmenting rhythmically: a recognizably organic element that comes apart at the very moment it manifests itself. The effect isn't mere austerity: on the contrary, the vocal timbres' ongoing artificiality amplifies a sense of loss, as if a human presence had been captured mid-dematerialization, preserved in form but not in substance.

"Zebra" and "Problem Areas" share a constructive mechanism: a broken rhythmic-melodic phrase, repeated and transformed. In "Zebra" — whose name pays homage to the u-he Zebra software synthesizer, used extensively on the record — the first section hammers out a geometric staccato recalling the hyper-abstract precision of math rock and the hyper-formal glitch of Ryoji Ikeda. The phrase then multiplies into counterpoints that mirror and chase one another. As in mathematician John Horton Conway's cellular automaton Game of Life, complex, self-organizing structures emerge from a few elementary rules, and the accumulation of formal elements generates its own vital horizon, something astonishing and unexpected.

"Problem Areas" works in a similar but opposite way: the melodic ostinato is immediately catchy, almost naive in its singability, and it's the pauses that do the work — interruptions that shift the meter with mechanical precision, forcing the ear to expect a continuation that doesn't arrive on schedule. The effect is disorienting precisely because the melody remains familiar: you're always on the verge of recognizing something, without ever quite managing to.

The virtual as utopia

"Chrome Country" closes the album the way "Boring Angel" had opened it: on an organ. But the mood is completely different — relaxed, almost dissolved, lulling. The transfigured sample of Enya's "Only Time" surfaces here and there, and sounds settle like brushstrokes with a long tail, overlapping puffs leaving a shimmering persistence in the air: an arpeggio that opens and closes, a trailing synth line, tapping piano notes, phenomena straddling the material and the immaterial, emerging and fading away. These are the "objects" Lopatin claims to have drawn from object-oriented ontology — autonomous sonic entities that combine to form something more articulated, elusive in shape but immediately recognizable.

"I constantly ask myself: what does it feel like to be this? What does it feel like to be that?", the artist has stated, extending the question not only to living beings (as in philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous 1976 paper "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?") but to things, instruments, fragments of sound. The goal is "to give inanimate objects a kind of secret life": to select sounds and let them interact in plain sight, until something unexpected emerges from their encounter — a sense of place, an atmosphere that belongs to none of the individual elements but is born only from their being together. In this space, what is real and what is virtual cease to be useful categories: a chopped-up vocal sample and a Korg M1 preset have the same consistency, the same presence as a chirp taken from a field recording. They build one another through mutual proximity.

This sensibility has recognizable roots. Brian Eno's ambient music as an autonomous soundscape, Suzanne Ciani's progressive new age as a timbral exploration of the synthesizer: both had shown that music could exist as environment, as object or process, without having to narrate anything. Lopatin had absorbed this lesson and bent it to his own purposes — in the degraded loops of Eccojams, in the dreamlike flows of his early Oneohtrix Point Never records, always favoring the blurred edge. The turning point of "R Plus Seven" lies in the shift from low resolution to HD: contrasts reveal sharp edges, haziness gives way to surgical clarity. The sound objects no longer evaporate — they take shape, occupy space, make themselves known.

It's not just a matter of audio quality. The rhythmic approach, too, marks a reworked continuity: staying true to his stated aversion to snares and conventional drum sounds, Lopatin plays with syncopation. Where previous tracks were essentially arrhythmic, "R Plus Seven" moves toward the opposite extreme, becoming hyper-rhythmic without falling back on IDM clichés. Segmentation as a feature of the sound objects themselves, not as a structural layer superimposed through an ordinary rhythm section.

The "HD" turning point has another root, less obvious but just as deep. Lopatin has said that he grew up listening to his father's jazz fusion cassettes — where, perhaps for the first time, he encountered sounds endowed with a life of their own, entities in dialogue with one another even before being instruments in service of a composition. On Herbie Hancock's "Sextant", which Lopatin calls the "most cybernetic" record of the "Mwandishi" era, he was fascinated by Patrick Gleeson's sound on the ARP 2600 and the Pro-Soloist: the keyboardist would push the machines into "berserk mode", with the CV gate pushed to its absolute limit. With the system that controls note triggering and intensity in analog synthesizers effectively knocked out, the trajectories became utterly unpredictable and seemed to follow their own logic, turning into subjects in their own right.

Among the tapes were also Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Birds Of Fire" and Return To Forever's "Where Have I Known You Before" — the latter so beloved that it pushed Lopatin to form a cover band, Trolls Of Precision, devoted almost entirely to their repertoire. With very different instruments and frameworks, "R Plus Seven" travels along similar lines of effort: formal rigor and timbral freedom feeding off one another, atmospheres that shift abruptly without losing internal coherence, sounds that turn into monstrum — irreducible presences that demand attention. It's a direction that, in the years following the album, digital fusion artists like Fire-Toolz, Cryptovolans, Nolocal Forecast and Vektroid would develop even more explicitly, pushing the encounter between that world's legacy and digital aesthetics to its extreme consequences — making their central, programmatic element out of what in Oneohtrix Point Never had remained a background allusion.

In his later work, Lopatin would continue to explore the boundary between human and artificial, in increasingly divergent directions. "Garden Of Delete" (2015) pushed the sound toward more dissonant, destabilizing territory, with an expressive violence almost antithetical to the composure of "R Plus Seven". "Age Of" (2018) unfolded the same combinatorial logic across an encyclopedic palette — MIDI harpsichords, android folk, smooth jazz, Baroque and medieval music — while "Again" (2023) added human collaborators and an orchestral ensemble, bringing the logic of sound objects face to face with the physical presence of flesh-and-blood musicians.

"R Plus Seven"'s most fertile legacy, however, unfolded elsewhere, in the aesthetic dubbed "utopian virtual" associated with names like Giant Claw, Equip, FM Skyline and Anatole Muster — and inaugurated, a couple of years before the album, by James Ferraro with "Far Side Virtual" (2011). The digital imagery of the Nineties and early 2000s — educational CD-ROMs, multimedia encyclopedias, science documentaries, the still-clunky, luminous three-dimensional graphics of early computers — is treated by these artists less as a nostalgic relic than as an interrupted conversation to be resumed. A utopia to be restarted through clean, layered arrangements, MIDI synthesizers and a post-everything feel that wants to see the Internet as a still-open promise. When this optimism becomes tinged with shadows that deepen its complexity, the strand can take on the narrative, maximalist traits of the epic collage: dense, cinematic digital tapestries, built through accumulation on rhythms and palettes just one step from the cybernetic darkness of deconstructed club.

"R Plus Seven" doesn't yet bear the darkest, most layered traits of that alternate history — but when, toward the end, the organ of "Chrome Country" bursts into an almost Yes-like turn, the surging, radiant majesty that fades out right at the peak of its splendor hints that the path, perhaps, had already been mapped out.

The album closes as it opened: on the sound of an organ, virtual but no less real for it. The "boring angel" that gave the first track its title wasn't an oxymoron: it was the bet that enchantment doesn't vanish when digitized — it waits inside the sounds the world had already filed away, ready to detonate.

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24/05/2026