Daniel Lopatin on making music in the “unbelievable psychic peril” of a pandemic
The electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never on isolation, the “cloaked insults” of reviews, and what Mark Fisher got right about time.
to discuss different schools of psychoanalysis
(“As a good Jungian…”) as he was his opinions on Thanksgiving dinner (“I don’t eat meat any more, but when I did, I felt that the dryness and the boringness of turkey was fundamental to the contrast with the mushy other stuff. I think turkey gets a bad rap”).
This mingling of the high and the low – the serious and the playful, the profound and the trivial – is key to Lopatin’s musical output, too. The son of Russian-Jewish emigrants, Lopatin was born in Massachusetts in 1982 and grew up playing his father’s Roland Juno-60 synthesiser, now his trademark instrument. As Oneohtrix Point Never, a name that plays on 106.7, the dial setting of the Boston radio station he listened to in his youth, Lopatin has established himself as a pioneering force of electronica, graduating from synth-based recordings to sample-heavy, patchwork quilt-like works that play with kitsch and nostalgia. Whether his latest project is chamber pop, EDM or a film score, his music always remains heavily sculpted, as though carved with a fine chisel.