Warp Records – WARPCD318
0PN mounts a definitive opus with his rapturous 9th studio album,
entirely produced during lockdown, with “executive production” by The
Weeknd, who also supplies vocals alongside Arca and Caroline Polachek.
‘Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’ is titled after the mispronunciation of
Magic 106.7, a local radio station in Boston, Massachusetts; the state
where Daniel Lopatin aka 0PN grew up, and where the album was created.
The radio station’s adult contemporary programming is a formative and
enduring influence on 0PN’s music, and it’s clear that he’s saved this
album title for some of his most accomplished tributes to his
influences, but refracted thru his prismatic styles to illustrate the
distance between that era, and this, with some of his most elusive,
illusive and beguiling sound design wrapped up in a mix of stunningly
mazy and pop-toned arrangements.
0PN is one of those artists we’d imagine took to lockdown quite
naturally, sequestering themselves away to immerse in their art for the
good of everyone outside. Written between March and July, the results of
‘Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’ speak for themselves as 0PN’s most
broadly appealing record, typically placing avant-inventiveness and
curiosity at the service of a tumultuous narrative that really needs
some kind of road-trip simulation game to go along with its possessed
dial-strafing.
You’re probably familiar with the album’s opening sequence, which
appeared on a lead single, and includes the lushest FM synthesis of 2020
in ‘Long Road Home’, and the rest of the album follows suit with a
profligate approach to genre, cutting from phased dream-pop grunge in ’I
Don’t Love Me Anymore’, to hypnagogic ident collage in ‘The Whether
Channel’, and The Weeknd’s romantic ‘80s power pop turn on ‘Lost But
Never Again’, crucially fractured with cut-scenes and mutant jingling of
the ‘Cross Talk’ parts that tie the album’s story together with
something approaching a sonic-visual analog of Safdie Brothers’ choppy
editing gone lysergic.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.