Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer
I haven't heard a better electronic music album this year
A couple of years ago, Daniel Lopatin discovered a massive music library ripped from commercial sample CDs in The Internet Archive. He bookmarked it but didn’t download it right away, and when he remembered it and wanted to return to it one day, it had disappeared.
After the files eventually resurfaced, Lopatin created a whole album exclusively with samples from that very library. That album, called Tranquilizer, is released this month on his long-time label Warp. It’s a triumphant return to form, taking up some of Lopatin’s most groundbreaking work in his two-decade career as Oneohtrix Point Never.
I’m quoting from the official press bio:
“Lopatin has always been drawn to the musically prosaic – sounds dismissed as marginal(ized), utilitarian, or too commercial to matter. Tranquilizer extends this fascination with forgotten media, transforming it into something visionary. Much of the record is rooted in Lopatin’s process of engaging with digital material, which he’s fed into custom software, manipulated, and ‘performed’ in real time to craft fifteen surreal, kinetic tracks.
The recovered library appealed to Lopatin not just as nostalgia, but as evidence of crafts. These once-forgotten sounds were written by working musicians tasked with building sonic foley for games, ads, and corporate media – music some might call soulless. Lopatin disagrees. He believes there is spirit even in the most functional music, and that art is forged as much from discipline as inspiration. His compositional process is a testament to this belief.”
These paragraphs, unusally lucid for a commercial press release, were penned by Grafton Tanner, an American academic who published a theory-heavy book on vaporwave (Babbling Corpse), and I really think he gets to the heart of what makes OPN’s music in general and Tranquilizer in particular such an intriguing listen.
Tim Hecker, who’d collaborated with Lopatin on the 2012 album Instrumental Tourist, once spoke about an image that deeply inspired him in the process leading up to one of his albums (it might have been Ravedeath, 1972). The image showed tons of burned CDs crushed by excavators in an attempt to crack down on piracy. It’s also a perfect metaphor for the topics Lopatin is raising on Tranquilizer.
When I first saw the 50 second trailer for the new album, it reminded me of Lopatin’s own classic Replica, released in 2011, then still on his own Software imprint. Pitchfork once ranked it on #20 of their list of the best ambient albums of all time. I don’t disagree – it’s probably still my favorite OPN record. Created largely from samples of TV advertisments and other commercial music from the 1980s and 1990s, it upcycled seemingly worthless noise into lauded pieces of sound art.
In a recent interview with Joshua Minsoo Kim for the Tone Glow newsletter, Lopatin responds to the parallels between Replica and Tranquilizer:
“While Tranquilizer is my most process-oriented record since Replica, the end result is so different that I want it to be experienced in and of itself. It’s tempting to compare the two, but I hope people listen to it as an experience with its own merits – I truly feel like I’ve never done anything like it before, and I’m happy about that.
(…) Replica is this incredible thing of these blasts of music, and Tranquilizer you get that too, but you can sit down and experience it as a whole in a way that I wasn’t personally able to do with Replica. And I love making a record record, like a sort of Dark Side of the Moon situation.”
It has been said before that Lopatin is more of a theorist and philosopher than a musician; he’s also the rare breed of avant-garde artist that exerts an influence on mainstream pop culture. He’s producing for The Weeknd and Charli XCX, scoring Safdie Brothers and Sofia Coppola movies, and working with David Byrne and Anohni. His trajectory is comparable to that of Brian Eno, another famous non-musician who emerged from the experimental fringes to produce big pop records later on, while continuing to make challenging music.
Lopatin’s parents are Russian immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1982, the same year he was born. His father had played in psychedelic rock bands since the 1960s, while his mother was a classical piano teacher. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, Daniel dabbled in high school bands inspired by the fiddly jazz fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever. He discovered hip-hop and techno on the radio, and after leaving for college in Western Massachusetts – where he studied library science to become an archivist –, he came back to Boston to work.
At some point, Lopatin had started playing around with a Roland Juno-60 synthesizer in his parents’ basement, while devouring 20th century philosophy books and science fiction novels by Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. Among a flurry of underground tape projects and homemade CD-Rs, he recorded a trilogy of early albums between 2007 and 2009, which were ultimately compiled on the lauded double album anthology Rifts (No Fun, 2009).
No Fun was a small independent label adjacent to the noise scene, run by the uncompromising sound artist Carlos Giffoni. Lopatin clearly didn’t make noise music – Rifts was deeply inspired by old synth records and new age tapes –, but his experimental kitsch-scape collages were received unexpectedly well in the noise and improvised music community.
Around that time, Lopatin started the YouTube channel sunsetcorp, where he’d upload experiments he called eccojams. For these remixes, he applied a technique adapted from the late DJ Screw, a visionary hip-hop DJ from Houston, to cheesy 1980s dance pop, smooth jazz and yacht rock songs, essentially slowing these tunes down heavily and adding echo and pitch-shifting effects. In the academic music world, similar sampling and editing techniques were known as ‘plunderphonics’.
Lopatin would add his own video art to these jams, editing together footage from old music videos, commercials, ads and animated films. These works would eventually be compiled on the audiovisual project Memory Vague (2009), a foundational document of the vaporwave scene. He’d also release some of the edits from the sunsetcorp channel on the tape release Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010) under the alias Chuck Person. Those two projects turned Lopatin into one of the central innovators of early vaporwave.
Over the last 20 years, Lopatin has reinvented himself time and again, lest someone might pigeonhole him into some tedious subgenre niche. He was never interested in becoming the posterboy of a scene; after making a name for himself with sci-fi synth arpeggios and proto-vaporwave, his brilliant album Returnal (2010) on Peter Rehberg’s Mego label started out with a five-minute burst of chaotic noise to move into a hyperreal, distorted vision of psychedelic ambient.
Rifts and Returnal were followed by Replica, and then by R Plus Seven in 2013. His five-album winning streak ran up to Garden of Delete (2016), again weirdly ahead of its time with its visionary abstractions of late-1990s alt rock and nu metal aesthetics, long before the revival of those genres had officially become a thing. In the decade leading up to today, Lopatin scored many more films, worked as a producer for artists from Soccer Mommy to David Byrne, and contributed as a writer, studio musician and co-producer to megastar The Weeknd’s last two albums.
Age Of (2018) was his first OPN album heavily reliant on his own vocals – but the further he forayed into vocal pop, the less interesting his solo work became to me. I’m not saying that Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (2020) and Again (2023) were bad records, but they just couldn’t quite reignite the fascination I felt from his earlier, mostly instrumental work. Sometimes vocals and lyrics and words, I don’t know, they just kill the allure for me.
Luckily for me and other fans that preferred his earlier work, Lopatin returns to his roots on Tranquilizer, but manages to sound exciting and fresh as well.
“Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation, but resurfacing”, Grafton Tanner writes in his press release. “Lopatin isn’t condemning a need for escape but, exploring what happens after. (…) It’s a reminder that even music nearly erased from history can reverberate in its hidden depths, and that the journey through the unreal can return us to the world more awake than before.”
From the cover, an abstract painting by the Mennonite artist Abner Hershberger, to the backstory of these almost-lost sample CDs, to the awe-inspiring, often completely overwhelming music, Tranquilizer is the vision of a true auteur, a kaleidoscope of strangely shimmering and glitchy beauty. It’s all I always loved about Lopatin’s music, condensed into an hour-long body of work. I don’t think I will hear a better electronic music album this year.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer will be released on Nov 21 on Warp Records. The tracks “Lifeworld”, “Measuring Ruins” and “Cherry Blue” have been released to streaming services so far.
Excellent post! I still recall being stunned not only by the Safdie’s brilliant film “Good Time”, but his soundtrack! Having never heard him before that moment in a darkened theater I had “my mind blown” as we used to say. Really looking forward to this new release!
Did you manage to get an advance copy of the whole thing? I agree with everything you wrote, and realllllly looking forward to it