The Windish Agency

“Lopatin has accomplished something many musicians making so-called experimental music fail to do: open our ears to new sonic possibilities and, more importantly, force us to reconsider and rewire some of our most basic assumptions.” (Wire, January 2010/311)

Oneohtrix Point Never is Daniel Lopatin, a US native whose work has brought him to the forefront of the modern electronic composition scene. Although Lopatin’s rise seemed meteoric following the praise for his double disc anthology “Rifts” (coveted by the likes of Wire, Pitchfork, Fader, Guardian UK, The Quietus, and XLR8R), it is the result of a love affair with polyphonic synthesizers dating back to childhood jam sessions with his father’s Juno 60; an instrument which, like B.B. King’s Lucille, he has never left behind. Audiences in the last year have gravitated to OPN’s profound arrangements, which manage to touch upon both mainstream and discarded electronic music histories; merging the structural freedom of noise with the abstract emotionality of work considered by many to be ‘background music’; in fact his passion to find personal meaning in failed new age utopias and liminal science fiction environments often brings his compositions to the refracted brinks of minimalism, drone, proto-techno, noise and pop; clarifying the past through a blissful repetition of its’ sonic signifiers. The sound of OPN is history filtered through modern process with an emphasis on structure and a humanness that resounds in its melodies; if one can communicate efficiently within the realm of electronic music, OPN reveals itself as a project with a zeal for expression, an emotive blinking light on the cold horizon.