Short of leading us back to the more accessible tautness of 2011’s Replica, Daniel Lopatin’s fourth album under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker, R Plus Seven tunnels deeper into the anti-ironic (yet sometimes humorous) dichotomy between digitalized instruments and their organic palpability. On RP7, Lopatin has made a convincing case for his primitively futuristic soundscapes by utilizing individual wedges of samples that would sound feeble by any other algorithm. He has pooled them together cell by cell, crafting a bright and vibrant clone that is eerily human, or at least, wants to feel human.
“Boring Angel” leads the album off with wavering organ lines, vaporous textures that sound almost choral until taking a cavernous dive as a wall of arpeggiated bars infiltrate the song. “Americans” starts with birdchirp loops and is suddenly capsized by a rundown of jungle-related soundscapes. Lopatin is consistently manipulating what we perceive as the progression of each track, and along with that he’s emphasizing the randomness of those expectations.
To play a trick on a similar association, inert computerized notes are woven to create a vividly textured helix of sonic DNA. By the time “He She” is over its hard not to see the various instruments and vocalists in a uniform procession, like the systemic, enveloping output of a church bell choir. On “Zebra,” Lopatin is doing something similar, painting with both a broad and limited palate of synthesized vocals, manifesting a familiar organism in a strange cacophonous ecosystem. We can listen to the track over again, as if translating a piece of literature, but we know neither language. Each time a track hits one of those emotional receptors, something still makes it unplaceable. Such is the case on “Chrome Country” which distorts seemingly intimate choral-like vocal lines, dragging them through a digital mud and finally the organ postlude leads us out, a perfect anti-bookend.
Lopatin compiled the sterile still lifes of Takeshi Murata in his uncanny video for the track “Problem Areas” which, like the majority of the songs on RP7, employs a range of fixed 8-bit-esque samples that are recognizably 80s, but locate ideas that are so blatantly 2013. And while most of us have found that the comment sections of YouTube are usually not the best places to facilitate in-depth discussions about music, scrolling below the “Problem Areas” video, its difficult not to take notice of the shallow critiques of Lopatin’s video. References to Salvador Dali and the word “pretentious” are the usual suspects, but much like the images in the video itself, all the comments seem to do is offer a very lackluster, synthetic glaze of randomized information. Such is the internet. As if in protest to the unrelenting expansion of all things computerized, Lopatin has retreated to the most primitive corners of digitized music (even on his own website) to exhibit how an elemental set of tools can be articulated in ways that drive such a narrow-banded medium past the ever-rising ceilings of current aptitude.
Today, Lopatin took to Reddit to respond to questions about anything from fans. One questioner asked for advice on creating electronic music, to which Lopatin responded, "Nike said it best. Just do it." In the end it doesn't matter whether RP7 was produced using Fruity Loops or Pro Tools, just like it doesn't matter how close to "real" sounding a digitized instrument can get. The music on RP7 doesn't need to be digital or human: like the vast potential of the internet, it lends itself to the realm of all things possible.
Grade: B+
Grade: B+
