Oneohtrix Point Never interview

I was just whining about how long this one was taking a couple of days ago...and now here it is. In my very humble, probably biased opinion, this is one of the best interviews I've done all year, mostly due to him, not me.

Anyway, check it out.


The Uncanny Effect of Being Almost Real: An Interview with Oneohtrix Point Never


By Jennifer Kelly 24 October 2013


A whistle. A church organ. A choir of angels. The album R Plus Seven is full of sounds that almost jive with real life experience, but which—on closer inspection—depart from the ordinary in subtle, unsettling ways.


“That uncanny effect of being almost real is a really uncomfortable and glorious state for me. I find it disturbing,” says Daniel Lopatin, who for the last half dozen years has recorded under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. His latest OPN album is, in some ways, his most grounded and homemade, built out of brief, mostly keyboard-based sounds, recorded at home, and approaching the structures of riff and melody. Yet it is also a deeply odd, somewhat disorienting piece of work, full of staccato, agitated motifs that overlap, contradict and interrupt one another, and woven through with the sound of inhuman voices, unreal instruments and not-quite-right rhythmic underpinnings.

“I wanted to make something that has a beautiful aspect but also a dread or unease. That reaches to be real and almost sentient, but then is not,” says Lopatin. “I felt like that was there already a lot of the time, but my job was to exaggerate that and characterize it even further.”

More

Barbez's lovely, hard-to-describe Bella Ciao

Very cool, completely unclassifiable album from Barbez...reviewed yesterday at Blurt.

BARBEZ – Bella Ciao
Tzadik

By JENNIFER KELLY

Barbez is hard to classify, but let’s give it a shot. They are a large ensemble, ethnically curious, jazz-experimental, proggily complex outfit with a tendency to explore beautifully obscure corners not just of the music world, but also of literature. Their last album Force of Light set the poetry of Romanian holocaust survivor Paul Celan to restless, rhythmically complex music. This current one, Bella Ciao performs a similar kind of alchemy with Roman Jewish liturgical song, taking ancient, archetypical melodies and embellishing them with complex swathes of stringed instruments, clarinet, Theremin, malleted percussion, guitar, bass and drums.

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They are streaming the whole album at PopMatters.

I'm also about halfway done transcribing my interview with Oneohtrix Point Never's Dan Lopatin, and it's a good one, stay tuned. And further, I am going to see Sam Amidon play live for the first time, despite the fact that I've been following his career since 2007's But This Chicken Proved False Hearted, and he grew up 25 miles from here, and his dad once wrote a musical for New England Youth Theater (my son's home turf). (I also got some good quotes from him for my sacred harp story, which was never published except on this blog, but which still draws hits pretty regularly.) Anyway, about time, wouldn't you say? I hope it stops thundering before 5 when I have to leave.

Liking CFCF, not crazy about Oneohtrix Point Never

I've got a couple of electronic records in the listening pile this week, which is always an opportunity to sound like an idiot, but I'm really, really enjoying CFCF's Music For Objects and somewhat less enamored of Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven. So, with the caveat that I do not really have any expertise in this area, I thought I'd think a little about why.

First the CFCF, which is a wonderfully restless, pointillistic montage of piano and percussive sounds. All the tracks are inspired by inanimate objects (hence the title), so that "Glass" has a lovely, crystalline clarity, while "Bowl" is somehow denser, earthier and, not sure how to say this, but a rounded-ness. all the tracks are made (by CFCF's composer/producer Michael Silver) out of the same basic elements, computer sounds, piano and something that sounds like malleted percussion, like a marimba or such (though the sounds might be synthesized, no idea about that). So there's an overall texture, but also a lot of variation in the individual pieces, a sense of personality almost. I really like it a lot.


Here's "Camera," which is built, more or less, on a not-quite-real-life sax-like sound suggests. I'm not sure what it has to do with a camera, but it's got quite a nice sense of slink and syncopation to it.


Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven is supposedly not intended as songs, but rather sonic material for an upcoming album. Which is maybe the problem. It's not that the individual sounds aren't intriguing, there's just no impetus to move from one to another. I think that Daniel Lopatin should have kept this private, maybe, and shared the finished material with us later.

What do you think?

Clinic's Free Reign

The new album from Clinic (out November 12 on Domino) is quite good, well in line with previous material (reverbed keyboards, jerky rhythms, abstract lyrics) but a bit jazzier than I recall...Daniel Lopatin from Oneohtrix Point Never mixed it, and it has a certain kind of coiled energy, as if it might, any moment, rear up and bite you, but it doesn't.

Anyway, there's an album preview-ish youtube up, which you can check out below.

Oneohtrix Point Never

A short review of Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica at Blurt today...

Oneohtrix Point Never
Replica
(Software/Mexican Summer)

Synth wizard Daniel Lopatkin injects a sense of rhythmic play into Replica, turning the boundless, water-colored landscapes of last year's Returnal, just like that, into kinetic sculptures. Early single "Sleep Dealer" dusts synth-washed undercurrents with glittery-high keyboard flourishes, transforming deep mystery into primary-colored child-like wonder.

More (but not much more)

A lot of people really don't like this video, apparently.