ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER - Again

A speculative autobiography. That's exactly how Daniel Lopatin describes "Again". But his, it would seem, is merely an elegant way of sidestepping the totality of a work that's indescribable, unpredictable, joyous, epic, mad, curious, magical, and so on all the way to New Year's Eve.

It's hard to believe, first of all. Because "just" three years ago with "Magic Oneohtrix Point Never" the American composer seemed to have already put away his top hat and devoured even the last rabbit on the barbecue, clinging too closely to an experimental electronics that was partly dessert. And yet, three years on, Daniel comes out with thirteen movements, fourteen for those who want the vinyl, that stage everything you could possibly want today from a record of other, advanced, HD, deconstructed, concept-tronica electronic music: call it whatever you like.

To do so, Lopatin starts again - hence "Again" - from the Garden of sounds in which he'd decided to wipe the slate clean back in 2015. So, from introspection and madness as screens for a boundless vision, which this time, however, digs inward, into the corners of memory, launching the listener toward a digital drift that is also an analogue landing. This is precisely the first of "Again"'s miracles: within its scores lie the demons and angels the man encountered during his years in Massachusetts. Reminiscences that take him back to the records he listened to with his mother and father, Russian Jews who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, both united by an infinite love of music, starting with the fusion that, not by chance, crops up between one (de)construction and the next.

Then there's the gaze out the window: destination Brooklyn. His studies in archival science at the Pratt Institute were a driving experience. Daniel is a miner and a librarian. In short, he digs things up and catalogues them. Helping him out is an ensemble styled as a (science-)fiction orchestra, NOMAD, conducted and arranged by Robert Ames, given emphatic support on three tracks, and above all Lee Ranaldo, Jeff Gitelman, Jamie Stewart and Nathan Salon, brought in to humanly counterbalance the Oneohtrix Point Never machine, in what turns out to be a futuristic dance hall of programming, beats and feedback.

The cheap, vintage PC speakers that dominate the cover - taken from a sculpture created by Matias Faldbakken and conceptualized by Lopatin through a photograph by Vegard Kleven - capture the aesthetic hook of a perception that pervades the listening experience: it's as if Oneohtrix Point Never had decided to cling to digital elements to turn them into an ox-cart useful for ploughing a field of scrap that becomes fertilizer, making melodies, rhythms, noises and guitar flashes bloom miraculously in line with what remains a supreme collective paranoia. Because describing the moments of this work is like crossing Khazad-dûm inside the robot EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) from WALL•E. But let's try anyway.

The orchestral incipit of "Elseware" is bucolic grace, the last smile at the world before plunging into Lopatin's multiverses. Starting with "Again" itself: what is it? You could call it the virtual dream of Visible Cloaks brushing up against Tomita's moogsploitation approach. And "World Outside"? Blanck Mass with a hula hoop. Landscapes, landscapes and more landscapes of impossible worlds. Then suddenly "Krumville", with Ranaldo and Salon in dream-pop mode, flanking Jamie Stewart as he intones the memory of a friend who slipped away, along the road connecting Kripplebush and Samsonville. On "Again", by contrast, an even more personal "geography" prevails, traced along coordinates that Lopatin renders through a wavering of patches, filters, sequences and dissonances.

On "Nightmare Paint" Jeff Gitelman's solo (?) fits in superbly amid a thousand reflections. And what to say of Ranaldo's entrance over the pulsations of "Memories Of Music"? Practically a fusion piece in high definition. And then there are Washed Out-like undertows in "On An Axis" that scatter into further noise crossfires between Ranaldo and Salon.

The second half of the record is the "human" part of the album. And a display of cosmic wonder like the dance of "A Barely Lit Path" could only be the perfect close to "Again". The closing word, on the final side of the second LP, is entrusted to the bonus track "My Dream Dungeon Makeover": five minutes of light filtered through an electronic prism. Yet another imaginative ascent from an enormous musician, capable of overturning everything and then some, in his own image and likeness.

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01/10/2023