Explore the looping, glitch-filled soundscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never's Again, with each cycle a step deeper into the digital sublime.
— 0 Pe N —
by Bryson Edward Howe
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The mind tends to complete patterns: through inclusions, exclusions, and intersections of exegesis, the hardwire human mind is always constructing complex pyramids of sign-symbol association, a constant delimitation of communication and meta-language. It makes us, in many ways, the most advanced species to walk the earth. In many other ways, it makes us predictable, divinable, hijackable, and Oneohtrix Point Never's vibro-fetishism finds in the loop the perfect strata of the inevitability; finding in the loop both the lull and the momentum and exploiting the innate tendency of the human mind to seek completion in repetition. Again physically loops back to prior work; in part, it is what Lopatin calls “a speculative autobiography,” but in others a transmission, a spellbound backwash of digital languages and sonic paranoias, what’s remembered and what’s forgotten—what is yet still incomplete.
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The techtonic quake brushed against my skin like silk and filled my mouth with a lingua franca thick and viscous (I can still taste electric honey), but never liquid and somehow never synthetic, finding a talced spirituality in the madrigal offal of malware—with the few scholium lyrics that survive his scalpel vocoded into unparsable nullity ("the body trail, the body trail, the body trail"). Oneohtrix Point Never doesn't really build beats so much as mutate them, spinning disruptive shards of noise around the gooey onyx skeleton of repetition and expectation, cycling, blurring, echoing through creation and dissolution where he cessions to the ill-ectro and lowers the beats; yielding to and readying for; the spiral.
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In an anti-matter universe, there are two original black holes: Gods and Atrocities. In this universe, there is now only the echo of both. What's left, the static dervishes of noise that fall like snow and bleed into the holographic insert zone, the space enclosing soft and shiny things in the seam of the present space—cradled between past and future—as feather-light trills soak into kaleidoscopic, maximalist electro caught in infinite playback. Hear the chimeric frequencies of a spectral data void, the temporal lattice of the electric wilderness, and aural spirals—a.k.a. the ever-returning wave. An acoustic palimpsest shudders into synthetic dreams of the overclocked mind. Heavenly music predicts new chapters, consequences of Old Testament characters, like Jacob finding purpose in God's motion. Choose your way in, through amp outlets or ear drums that don't yet know I'm old, and then resonate with the concrete (metal music isn't welded, but electronic music is wired): because once you're in, the echo never ends—
1/0/TRX.NVR
by Caleb Carter
3. Rigpa
All staying clear, repetition will keep a good life accelerating in sibilant ecstasy. Note that in every iteration of the human race’s playback devices the signs of their corruption (buffer, glitch, scratch) renders the listener unable to move forwards. Again is an instructive title. On one listen it plays as an ambient album, a singular composition returning to its glitch motif so often our ears are pastured. But on the next, the listener is free to observe each reiteration as a singular blade of grass; the music turns from calm to chaos, and as the antecedent is torn in the mile winds, sink lower (down-loading) and look above to see a thousand green towers, dancing. Lopatin treats the enormity of human creation being uploaded into thin air (including his own) with such freakish reverence it is hard to tell if his Ctrl-V atlas maps suicide or glory. He makes - has always made - bellmetal monstrums fleeing from glitch-gospel rectories (on that particular Olympus, I think Memories of Music might actually top Chrome County). But Again sprints and gleefully knows it will have to return home uphill at nightfall. Briefly, down in the lead-acid moat it can play at deformity, half-corrupt on one CD, a cipher of the numinous on B.
2. SHODAN
For artists in the Age of Information, self-mythologizing is not only imperative for succeeding a market vampyrically harvesting human faces to disguise its algorithm, but impossible to avoid. Your art is your content is your data. Information is an unfathomable grimoire, and the more you know, the more you realise you don’t. In February, https://pointnever.com/ became a rhizomatic archive. Developed by VOID MAIN Studio with aid from OPN’s Discord (a web of harvester ant hives for dark-forest folklores), it maps the totality of Lopatin’s prolific output top-to-bottom, from singles and performances, to features, soundtracks and loops. The most intriguing facet of its cat’s cradle, however, are the green strands that illuminate his music’s internal ‘References’. One of these reveals that Love in the Time of Lexapro is “of the same world” as Age Of, retconning a hydromantic etude into an apocalyptic tale whose warbles are of the dying, but also of the artificial (electric) and of the sentient. Who, then, speaks from under the sea? You see how little we require for Atlantis to be built.
1. Ikon
Threshing the material of myth from its web of time is a dizzying exercise, one in which sinking to touch the subatomic requires submerging the periphery in its soup, so one can’t tell up from down, space from the dust of space, instrument from sound, shellac from basalt cliffs, or, when turned loud enough through headphones, cannon-fire from the peal of a bell.
---Vantage//Volume//Viscosity---
BONDAGE//Of the USSR we have only skeletons and stories, abandoned factories and obsolete agricultural tools//EXCESS//Wreathed in the pipes beneath the chimneys and the gaskets inside machines, you’re likely to find alloy emblazoned in the melted bell memory of Stalin’s pogrom of sound//HARVEST//Those bells, sacramental tulips of the Orthodox church, were sanctioned to play only one prime tone, loud, without harmony, so as to accurately encode the voice of god//ECCO//-ing: record, play, s, s, s, s, All stay
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