Oneohtrix Point Never’s Quest to Make Music That Freaks People Out
Summary
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-May, the electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, was rehearsing at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, a starship-like modern-architecture apparition in this upstate city. With a brief residency in a state-of-the-art black-box rehearsal studio, Mr. Lopatin was leading his first full group of live musicians under the Oneohtrix Point Never (or OPN) moniker to prepare for the multimedia production “Myriad” — Mr. Lopatin calls it a “concertscape” — that had its premiere at the Park Avenue Armory May 22 as part of the Red Bull Music Festival and will go on to tour other festivals and arts spaces like the Barbican in London. The music was from OPN’s new album, “Age Of,” which was concocted in studios and on computers but was now being painstakingly reverse-engineered for real-time concert performance. The new album involves, among other things, a theory of historical epochs, a post-human artificial intelligence, a sonic palette drawing from folk and Baroque music — with plenty of harpsichord — as well as glossy and grating electronic timbres and, most of all, a deep distrust of anything approaching stability. “Every song is an opportunity to freak somebody out,” Mr. Lopatin said during an interview in one of Empac’s conference rooms while his band got set up.
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