Review Summary: Fabrics of the past quilted together.
In a sense Daniel Lopatin is the anti-A.I. artist, he is somehow able to take artificiality and craft it into something that sounds and feels alive. The music he creates, made up almost entirely of samples from existing media dating back to the VHS era, he deconstructs and reconstitutes into a vivid tapestry of intricately layered atmospheres and complex rhythms. Carefully woven ambient tones, fragments of speech and song and light instrumentation have become the familiar trademarks of the Oneohotrix Point Never moniker, spanning a remarkable 11 LP discography over the course of nearly two decades. This newest effort,
Tranquilizer, could be considered somewhat of a return to form (though Oneohtrix’s music is often formless), utilizing much of what made 2013’s
R Plus Seven such a fascinating listen and evolving it further with a greater focus on pacing and delicacy. OPN’s music no longer stops and starts, it flows effortlessly, making
Tranquilizer’s near hour-long runtime pass by quickly before we’re ready for it to end.
Appropriately, the music of
Tranquilizer keeps you on the edge of comfort with a slight unease. It frequently blurs the borders of cold and inviting, relaxing and anxious, both leaving your thoughts to wander while at the same time commanding your attention. The uncanny nostalgic feel of the sampling lulls the listener into a state of comfort before the harshness of glitchy electronics takes them by surprise. The sound almost projects the imagery of a human mind with lapsing memory, trying to recall bits of the past through a rapidly moving stream of consciousness. Samples like crying babes and starship blips occasionally reach through the density of the atmospheric computer haze and are quickly shushed by synthetic distortion. The lush, reverberating textures make the album’s sound feel vast in depth which helps amplify the colorful pops of the samples and the isolated warmth of the instruments.
Lopatin utilizes several sounds and samples here, many of which are taken from the same Internet Archive library, applying them thoughtfully throughout the album’s 15 tracks. Pieces of production music, advertisements and sound effects are stretched, stuttered and transformed until nearly unrecognizable from their original recordings. Tribal winds heard on “Storm Show”, space-age choruses on “D.I.S.”, David Gilmour-esque guitars on “Fear of Symmetry” and 80’s new age synthesizers on “Waterfalls,” all give
Tranquilizer a richly diverse palette. The sweeping gusts of Lopatin’s synthesizer breath in and out on tracks like “Bumpy” and carry over into “Lifeworld,” juxtaposed with the unorthodox Warp-type beats that have been used well in previous OPN releases of the past.
Despite its tracklist, many of the bridging ambient pieces, such as “Bell Scanner”, are relatively short in length which works well to keep the album from dragging at all into monotony. Each song has a pulse and moves along without meandering, keeping the listener engaged with somewhat sporadic pivots in structure. The standout “Rodl Glide” is maybe the most unique song on the album, opening with a laid-back trip hop-type portion that abruptly shifts into a glitchy, garage rave beat before gradually fading away into the album’s closer. “Waterfalls” is also a wonderfully layered song, incorporating several percussive New Age-style instrumentals that leave the album to end on relatively upbeat note.
Once again Lopatin shows that he is a master of repurposing the old and refitting it with modern sensibility.
Tranquilizer fits well into the nostalgia-brained music world of today without coming across gimmicky or dated. It is a collage of sound from times past, beckoning pieces of the mind thought lost to resurface. This is an Oneohtrix release both at its most fluid and focused. It’s dense but not overstuffed, it’s wandering but not aimless and it takes you far away without leaving you feeling stranded. If ever a case could be made that something near-entirely synthetic could feel real,
Tranquilizer would certainly be up for consideration.
Recommended Tracks:
Bumpy
Lifeworld
D.I.S.
Rodl Glide
Waterfalls
