As SPIN magazine recently complimented in their recent 8/10 review for ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER‘s latest album Replica, the signature ambient sound would “provide the perfect soundtrack” to famed futurist Ray Kurzweil’s theory known as “Singularity” — the belief that mankind is destined to leap from living and breathing in the physical realm to living and synapsing at a higher level of consciousness inside the TRON-like realm of technology and silicon. ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER is the moniker of Brooklyn-based music producer Daniel Lopatin who began creating music back in 2006, with Replica being his fifth album.
SPIN goes on to explain the source material for Replica: “Lopatin sampled the source material from 1980s television commercials, collected on DVDs that he claims to have purchased from a “hoarder/nostalgia-dealer dude on the Internet.” Scraps of rustling percussion, hazy strings, and hiccupping voices provide the foundation, while gleaming synths and sparse piano melodies arc skyward, elegiac monuments to forgotten broadcasts and bygone media. Unlike his previous work’s frenetic buzz, everything here is bathed in a warm, fuzzy glow, a high-density tangle of frequencies giving way to a languid journey into the cathode-ray-tube dreamscape. Both lyrical and hypnotic, Replica serves as a deeply romantic testament to the possibilities of life in the Cloud.”
You can read the entire review by visiting SPIN. In their equally glowing thumbs-up, FADER‘s Naomi Zeichner writes: “What Lopatin has made, from commercial detritus and some piano, are satisfying and serious mantras. Across the record, these phrases share a level headed, weird optimism. They feel like a new religion, or at least something to look forward to.” And NME also gave the album 8/10 with John Doran writing: “‘Replica’ is a rallying call for people who don’t see synthesisers purely as objects of retro-fetishism, but rather as agents of future creative potential. He creates woozy riffs and psychedelic drones on his father’s old Roland Juno-60 before warping and moulding the sound using analogue filtering, tape manipulation, plate reverb and other antique techniques …The theory side of what he does is interesting, but above and beyond that he continues to herald the next stage of analogue future psychedelia beyond Boards Of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children’, which is more than enough to be getting on with.” The album was also ranked among Pitchfork’s highly prized Best New Music, and received huge praise from the Guardian as well. You can stream the entire album below and to pick up your own copy be sure to visit iTunes. I’ve also attached the beatifully surreal (and much talked about ) video for Replica’s title track, as well as the video for “Sleep Dealer”. For all things ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER you can follow him on Facebook, Tumblr, Soundcloud, Twitter, and visit his website at PointNever.com.
