eMusic Review 0
Last year’s breakout album Replicas elevated laptop noisemaker Dan Lopatin’s bracing Oneohtrix Point Never project to new heights, but it also revealed a new wrinkle in his sound. Built primarily on layers of finely-minced commercial samples from the ’90s, Replicas‘s bright-yet-perplexing sound was a clear break from OPN’s previous output. Rifts, a three-CD or five-LP set, finally culls three of Lopatin’s early albums, along with two extra discs of material, corralling an oeuvre once scattered across innumerable handmade CDRs, noise cassette splits, and ridiculously-limited LPs.
Evocative from his very first effort, 2007′s Betrayed in the Octagon, “Woe is the Transgression” finds Lopatin conjuring a bleak, forlorn, lead-heavy atmosphere of analog synthscapes. While his sonic forebearers – be they Klaus Schulze or Cluster – often emphasized the utopian and bucolic with their array of synthesizers, Lopatin’s vision is dystopian, paranoid, ashen. Two years on, tracks like the arpeggio-heavy “Computer Vision,” soaring nine-minute “Format & Journey North” and epic 16-minute cosmic journey of “When I Get Back From New York” allow in a bit more light.
With titles like “Transmat Memories” “Laser to Laser” and “Zones Without People” and analog tones, Rifts most readily brings to mind pulpy sci-fi paperbacks of the 1970s, the… read more »
