Oneohtrix Point Never – “Cherry Blue”

This new Oneohtrix Point Never album cycle has been some real audacious bullshit. Since the day Tranquilizer was announced a mere month ago, Daniel Lopatin began releasing advance singles from it “where Sunday meets Monday, weekly” by the handful. In this attention economy? In this oversaturated fourth quarter of new music releases when some of us are still playing catch-up with what was piling up weeks ago? Man, I don’t care which Safdie you’ve worked on creating liminal space soundtracks for or which mega pop stars you’re producing Billboard bangers for, because you have to be kidding me if you thought these pages were going to attempt keeping up with that.

This week, however, we are collectively absorbing the whole thing, as Tranquilizer is now out digitally ahead of its physical release this Friday. An unpopular opinion that may go against every fiber connection within Lopatin’s hyper-online world is that being able to sit with the entire body of the album rather than its early bits and parses will give you a better perspective of its post-digital makeup. It all collects wonderfully, whether tracks are respectably supporting compliments to the entire wireframe whereas others stand out as core components. “Cherry Blue” is of the latter. It’s an ambient synthesis of Lopatin’s uncanny engineering of found media recreated for a new age consumption. Chimes breezing in cosmic winds, the music of space as imagined by terrestrials, spiritual transcendence as imagined in sound by wellness grifters, and the distant transmissions of sax-driven rock radio and warped, corroded guitar-pop — it’s as if all sonic spectrums from the past three decades coexist here in one strange hue on 0PN’s timeline.