Why must we always assume that experimental or drone-ish music is difficult to connect to on an emotional level? I can understand some people's misgivings about the creative and emotional viability of repeated lines of sustained skeletal synths or patchwork avant cinematicism. There are some such artists who mistake creativity and inspiration for laziness and incomplete musical aptitude and these artists, with their misplaced sense of suggested expressionism, make it that much more difficult for like-minded individuals with an uniquely slanted take on cinematic musical vistas to be taken as anything more than oddities among the more directly album/song-structured artists.
Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin takes on the enormous tasks of creating cohesive music statements froms the loops of vocal samples and repetitive beats and percussive eccentricities which have become his hallmark in the wake of his exceptional releases as OPN, such as2010's Rifts and Returnal. And as well-crafted and creative as those albums were, you could still hear him finding his musical footing, his instincts were still to be fully refined. On his latest release Replica, Lopatin seems intent on overcoming the instinctive limitations of the genre within which he works, there is ample room for creativity but let so for emotional connection. The jittery, sample-laden music which has come to represent Lopatin and all of his contemporaries, such as The Books and The Avalanches, doesn't generally lend itself to the same type of intimacy that may come from a more deeply introspective/personal piece of music, as could be described by any given listener. But to his credit, under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker, Lopatin has managed to create some of the emotionally sustained experimental work yet released to be purposed as such. Songs like the vocal stutter-sampling and shifting chromatics of "Sleep Dealer" and "Replica", with its' intial offering of somber piano led astray into deconstruction and back again, reveal the ever-changing, ever creative mind at work behind Oneohtrix Point Never. And in the background of these songs, something is moving, getting ever closer to the listener, just a shadow at times. It's the sensation of intimacy and invitation, among the dissonance. You will feel these songs. Lopatin has made damn sure of that.
Tracklisting:
01. Andro
02. Power of Persuasion
03. Sleep Dealer
04. Remember
05. Replica (listen to the mp3 below)
06. Nassau
07. Submersible
08. Up
09. Child Soldier
10. Explain
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