Performing “a speculative autobiography” that loops back and forth between new and prior work live at Royal Festival Hall, OPN's musical meditation on his self is a figuration of memory and melancholy.
"Nothing's inside, just a slug that provides a barely lit path from your house to mine..."
Oneohtrix Point Never doesn't really build beats so much as mutate them. His esoteric vibro-experimentation rattled tangibly around the space, and brushed against my skin like silk and filled my mouth with a lingua franca thick and viscous (I can still taste electric honey), but never liquid and somehow never seeming synthetic (wedged somewhere between classical music and a post-internet malware)—lyrics are vocoded into unparsable oblivion (the body trail, the body trail, the body trail) as OPN spins his disruptive sonics around what some Alien creature might, accidentally, mistake for a traditional song, and potentizing his signature melancholia.
The set existed in this holographic insert zone: the space enclosing soft and shiny, within weird and wonderful, in the seam of the present space that just so happens to be between past and future. While a Lopatin-lookalike marionette danced an eerie ballet on the screen behind the irl Lopatin (live puppeteered and streamed from the stage, like Being John Malkovich’s sertraline-addled cousin), feather-light trills are soaked into kaleidoscopic, flashy, disjointed, maximalist electro and combine to create something still spaced-out and graceful. In the noise is bliss, which slowly drifts us off into tranceportation / tranceformation.
I leaned into my friend sat next to me entranced, “can you believe we graduated here?” I was virtually sitting in the same row, yet miles away / years in the future and looping somewhere, some point, years before. I looked around the room, in the brief flashes of light, catching faces of friends, some new and some very old. Into dissolution, into noise: bliss.
The mind tends to complete patterns: through inclusions, exclusions, and intersections of meaning, the human mind is always constructing complex pyramids of sign-symbol association, a constant perception of communication and meta-language. It makes us, in many ways, the most advanced species to walk the earth. In many other ways, it makes us predictable, divinable, hijackable. Oneohtrix Point Never finds in the loop the perfect strata of this inevitability, the lull and the momentum, exploiting the innate tendency of the human mind to seek completion in repetition, while his signature retro-futurist fetishism twists between analogue and digital. His newest album, Again, similarly loops back to prior work, becoming a meditation with his younger self. In Lopatin’s words, the album is in part “a speculative autobiography,” a transmission, a spellbound backwash of digital languages and sonic paranoias, what’s remembered and what’s forgotten.
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Catch Oneohtrix Point Never on tour this Spring.