The soundtrack to the best 1970s sci-fi film never made, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal was one of the best unheralded records of 2010. With Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Lopotin’s alter-ego falling into the same avant-garde electronica niche as contemporaries including The Field and former labelmate Emeralds, few may have heard Returnal, but its synthesis of music simultaneously artificial and organic ranged magnificently from jarring post-industrial glitch to other-world future electro and blissed-out transcendence.
Its luscious compositions won a raft of new converts who may not previously have considered the genre, including Antony and the Johnsons’ Antony Hegarty, and if YouTube hits are a reliable measure, most of those have stayed on-board for the release this week of Oneohtrix Point Never’s sixth studio album, Replica. More abstract but no less entrancing than its predecessor, it is the increasingly rare kind of record that demands to be listened to with your full attention, rather than played as mere background noise.
As Replica‘s cover art (see above) hints at, Lopatin’s focus has shifted from far-away star gazing to a more close-up meditation on human mortality and the ephemeral nature of memory. Much of it is based around audio sliced from compilations of old television commercials, embodying pop culture’s most trusted technique of recycling what has come before to create something new and revitalised
Less pop art and more art installation, Replica is ultimately an album fashioned from shards of a broken past and pieces of a culture discombobulated by the infinite loop of media imagery and white noise that it continuously projects into the ether. Scouring this bottomless landfill of discarded and disposable memories, Lopatin has taken a selection disparate off-casts and refracted them through his own unique prism to produce an urgent, evocative and essential piece of work.
Behold the mournful beauty of its title track, complete with an accompanying video that contains imagery taken from the Soviet Union’s cheap (and ever so slightly trippy) Tom and Jerry rip-off, Nu, Pogodi!:
