Review: Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’
Typing and deleting opening lines for an album I have been left too emotionally affected by to verbally depict is a situation that likely reflects what the Oneohtrix Point Never discography is really all about. I am compelled to write reviews not because it’s easy for me to sell things to people, but because at this time, there just isn’t a form of casual conversation that can actually induce the drive to engage for themselves with whatever has left me ecstatic and stunned in the past hour to them. The review doesn’t actually help me, because its rules can’t be broken in front of people who expect me to write nothing but selling. The review should be seen as a perpetual vent. This is only coming to mind because there hasn’t yet been a chance for me to write about this strange dysfunctional form of writing I’m trapped in. Even my potential retrospective on Garden of Delete has been plagued in its draft form by the same dysfunction. But God, I fucking love this album, and that’s all I want to talk about. Let me ramble about it, it has weight on my mind and I can’t stop thinking about it. I love Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, and if I had to find an opportunity to excuse every slander of professionalism that I could write, this would be the album to tie my ramblings to, if not anything by Lopatin since 2010. Anyone picking it up should have the same attitude to listening as is to writing here. The “Cross Talk” interludes already say the same. A voice burps “elevator music…”, the OPN trademark of joyous entropy kicks in, the album’s press release calls it a “darkly humorous reflection” because “dissociative” apparently still has negative connotations. This album slinks irretrievably far into its night-phased pool because it can, and Abel Tesfaye encourages it as it avoids expected areas of retreat, meandering on and frolicking because it can, making its own little kosmische dips that’re unknowingly the foundation of big dumb power ballads: we have successfully located the trademark, there it is, yes, now it is hypnagogic. Moving past the need for the annual soapbox lecture on cultural memory feels great, even if it’s like crevices and cracks forming in the desert, right? It comes apart with regards to just making lush music.
mOPN is a psychedelic record like any album of Lopatin’s since R Plus Seven, as in, psychedelia in terms of the loose and fluid replication of the activity of listening to music that you are making, not an exact factory imprint of baroque pop or hard rocking. The process of mimicking an impression of pop music is made psychedelic, in opposition to just mimicking psychedelic pop: Age Of dancing on the firmament of his understanding of pastoral music, the shift from nature to industry, back to industrial nature, etc. Maybe psychedelia has to be redefined in looser, more fluid terms now that Daniel Lopatin is making more openly psychedelic music (at least by word of mouth). Maybe ever since Genesis P-Orridge kept parodying the Summer of Love, thriving in the ever-changing counterculture of industrial music, critics should’ve situated it in the present rather than in one burdensome era. Who will account for the bleeps and bloops on Surf’s Up and Sunflower? If the textures at the end of Garden of Delete’s “Ezra” are DMT phenomena then surely there are other strands being gaseously emitted on mOPN. A very peculiar and helpful line in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense following an impression of William S. Burroughs comes to mind: “A strafing of the surface in order to transmute the stabbing of bodies, oh psychedelia.” It’s in the second half of mOPN that this description starts to be visualized in my mind. Think of intentional glitches as holes, cuts and slashes in the surface of the music, in the mode of Lucio Fontana’s paintings, openings for you to slip through, here to be forced to slip through. Sitting in the backseat of a car on a long drive and actively demanding yourself to start half-paying attention to the radio out of sheer personal interest in hearing music “soft enough to change, somewhat chaotic but able to grasp onto something”. Passive listening disengages in the wrong sort of way. Yet again, mOPN tackles this and offers itself as a thesis on listening to pop music sideways, because elevator music is getting annoying, and when forms of art are universally replicated to the point of being interestingly annoying, people start mimicking it for themselves, and other people start mimicking it. It isn’t a parody of parody or vicious cycle because it’s having actual fun for once. When OpenAI Jukebox was unveiled this year with its fuzzy gnomic replicas of Ariel Pink and John Maus included, hypnagogic pop was finally reborn. The whole Skynet thing has to be dropped in favor of actually appreciating how we mingle with technology and have thought like cyborgs for long periods and something else about nonexistent nostalgia has to be said too. “Lost But Never Alone” is its rebirth’s ceremonial music, oscillating in its structure between parodying it and cheering on it, “I Don’t Love Me Anymore” is its louder, brasher and yet somehow more delicate daytime equivalent leaning towards Garden of Delete’s fantasia of shattered glitched out alternative rock. It is these cuts and slashes in what would otherwise be considered nonchanging style that Lopatin’s collaborators actively encourage, not just by himself. Nolanberollin’s monologue and verse on “The Whether Channel” celebrates the affinity for hazy hip hop that the OPN ethic always held in a gentle cuddle, if at least in ways that no one got before DJ Premier’s clicks and cuts had to keep being evoked. The blend has to keep going. But, on the album, for my love of the album: it is a trip. Remembering that two hours ago I was laying down in the dark with headphones on, finally achieving a hypnagogic state while listening to hypnagogic music marked by surface-cutting glitches, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is, then, Daniel Lopatin admitting that he yet again “would like to put a knife in things — on my own terms”, while putting a knife in things, and I’m very happy for him. And then I realize I don’t know how to talk about how much I love this album without being incredibly informal and there we go, informal music, informal listening. The bold “ident collage” hypnagogia of sections of “The Whether Channel” and “Auto & Allo” and the node-by-numbers hypnagogia of “Tales From the Trash Stratum”. These are tableaux of these slashed, holed pop sounds, filters and flowers and encoders dripping off of a marble Lopatin, pop music diagonally, whatever incomprehensible theory bullshit Caroline writes next. The use of texture on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is not limited to new age music, nor does it laugh at the limits of new age music either, but it seems to pretend to limit itself in a way that emits an entirely different feeling than what the genre intends. This is practically how the music of Oneohtrix Point Never works; pretending to limit itself in a genre, in a way that differs from the intent of the genre. How do you break a power ballad, not in half, but as if it’s being short-circuited? This is another round of Lopatin’s own appreciation for what I called “textural indulgence” in 2018. It’s a car radio that provokes you to be Merlined while at heart being “a sort of hyperactive child who drinks a lot of sugar and then crashes really hard”. Then music is just pre-spent quantity and I yum it.
10/10.
