Daniel Lopatin has been a very online type of guy long before such a thing even became cultural vernacular. The rabbit hole portal pursuits deep into the Internet’s underbelly that this man knows likely rival that of the most dangerous cyber security threat on the planet. Thankfully, he’s no nefarious motives with his interest beyond creating art through a deconstructions of it which has amounted to his very own digital monument in sound as Oneohtrix Point Never.

The origin story behind his latest experimental electronic opus, Tranquilizer, practically sounds fated, even by simulation theory standards. According to Lopatin, the listen uses preserved samples ripped from ’90s-era CDs that initially lived on the actual Internet Archives until they, in an ironic twist, became lost media of their own at one point due to some vague DMCA objections. Their resurfacing — now more permanently restored within OPN’s fair use creative pursuits — only adds an additional chapter to his digital historian lore.

Whereas Lopatin’s accidental star power as a sleek, space age synth-pop producer and cinematically ambient film score auteur has risen in recent years, the amorphous, artificial humanity oddity within his soundcraft reawakens here akin to landmarks Replica and R Plus Seven. It’s more than just a rediscovering of the fine electronic avant garde art of syncing together digital fragments and intentionally corrupted files filled with nature, projected extraterrestrial signals, and vapory blankets of calm to elicit a beautifully unsettling sonic mirror of our culture lived through the online lens.

OPN’s hyper-meticulous grotesque fascination with the impacts of digital degradation on our lives make themselves known before you get too comfortable in your surroundings, with tracks like “Bumpy” and “Fear of Symmetry” rejecting meditative zone outs in their scratched surfaces and jarring incongruencies when attempting to pry their way toward serenity. In moments where the senses feel more cosmically aligned, such as they are on “Cherry Blue” or “Bell Scanner”, it’s as if they’re simulating the upgraded version of reality of a content dump for these over-saturated, broken attention economy times. Thankfully, Lopatin is well-versed in the trust economy just as well, prescribing his Tranquilizer as an antidote to it all by using its own disposable substances against it — and one that you may want to buy on your preferred form of physical just in case the digital world fails us once again.

Highlights: “Bumpy”, “Fear of Symmetry”, “Cherry Blue”

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer is available now on Warp Records.

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