Oneohtrix Point Never Just Wants You to Be a Good Person

Photo courtesy of Oneohtrix Point Never

There's multiple versions of Oneohtrix Point Never—real name Daniel Lopatin. Whichever corner of the internet you hang out in, you're bound to see a distinct version of him. There's the Red Bull Music Academy guest speaker, demonstrating how different pieces of his compositions come together to create a larger composition of strange beats and sounds before a small group of people. Or the version where he's some ultra memelord, making nu-metal parody logos before going on tour with Nine Inch Nails to play 20-minute drone sets reminiscent of the old days in Massachusetts basements. The art world knows the version of him as a collaborator with new media artist Jon Rafman, or composer of the soundtrack to Sofia For Coppola's The Bling Ring. Possibly you might think of him as a sprawling marketing mastermind, creating an alternate reality story about a 13-old alien music blogger who's obsessed with another band made up by Lopatin.

However, the version of OPN I met was a lot simpler: a guy that just wants other people to be good humans.

Before we get to that, though, let's talk about Lopatin's music. Under OPN, he's put out one of the most complex and dense records of the year, Garden of Delete. It's a 12-song semi-concept record that steps in and out of reality (he recently broke down every track on the record for THUMP). A song can be about both shitty gossip site for teens and theory on human instinct. Through all the meaning, you're shown a variety of different noises and samplings, but most of all feelings. He holds high art and low art at the same level, and is willing to throw both at you with tremendous speed. It's weaponized self-reflection of the grossest parts of all of us.

Yet when you're around him, it's easy to forget about the complicated nature of Lopatin's music. I recently met up with the musician, and immediately was struck by how casual he is. His chipper attitude is welcoming. His eyes show how excited he is about everything from an upcoming show to the birthday party he's off to later that night. In his darkly lit studio (so he's less aware of the actual size of it), he casually points out his Roland Juno keyboard inherited from his dad, the subject of 20-page forum discussions in the far reaches of the net. In our conversation we talked about getting into band lore found in old music magazines passed down from older sisters and cousins. In each reference he makes, be it to an exhibit at the New Museum or talking about the old-ass NeXt computer his parents had, it's easy to see the distilled pieces in his personality that alchemize the overall body of work that has introduced so many people to unconventional electronic music. The crux of Garden of Delete becomes much clearer, into a record equally about things he finds amusing as things he finds distressing, all medias and emotions and versions being equal and as important.

Noisey: So we both went to Pratt. You did data archival?
Oh, shit. Cool! I did, I did the data side of it from 07-09. I have some good friends from the program. I did not like the dean too much. She was unusually difficult to talk to. And took away whatever scholarship I had, took it all away. I did great my first year. I did two practicums, perfect GPA. Which in grad school, if you’re not getting A’s you’re kind of not doing it right. But still, I was working, had a practicum and still going on tours without missing a beat. Then second year they’re like “nope, no money for you!” and I was like “what do you have to do? This is crazy.” So I tried to meet up with her, and she just…

Shut you off?
Yeah. Other than that it was a pretty good experience. Second half of my second year I was starting to get shows, like it was the very beginning of starting to get shows. The start of being able to make a living off of everything.

Makes sense. I remember seeing the EPs and stuff being passed around on 4chan and everything in 2009ish, and then when Replica came out it was wild to see mainstream publications pick up.
Right. In 09, I think that was the year Rifts came out on and Wire wrote about it. Then I was able to get these gigs for 300, 400 euros or whatever. It was like “holy shit,” and then Carlos of No Fun [records] took me out to Europe. We were like sleeping in the same room type of situation, and I thought it was good as it was going to get. I was lugging my keyboard in a hardcase.

That the Juno? You ever play shows without it?
After that tour, oh yeah. I was like “oh my god, I have to get a grip. This is impossible.” I was throwing that on trains, it was painful as hell.

You ever have to deal with the airplane losing your shit?
Nah never, it always ends up being excess baggage so it gets there, I just have to wait a long ass time for it to come out. Always the last person at the fucking airport.

Looking like a maniac with all these cases.
Yeah, like what was I working, dude. I was playing my first show in Germany with that dude that started Tigerbeat6. He was like “dude the Juno is cool and everything, but you have to switch to computers.” I was like, “okay! Whatever you say.” [laughs]

I think that’s what I always appreciated about your music, like it never seemed like you were a huge nerd about the dumb stuff.
Right. Well I think there’s a difference between being a nerd and being a geek, maybe I was a nerd but I wasn’t a geek. I love stuff and I want to know everything about it, but I wanted to use the thing. I wanted to always be the end user, I wasn’t particularly interested in how it’s built. I want to learn the history of something, or the vibe. I was drawn to computers and nerdy stuff, but I wasn’t a “masterful synthesist” or something. I was always just kind of writing these little songs. I wasn’t very good at video games, I just wanted to watch my friends slay. I want to be around it, but I’m not necessarily that equipped to be great at it.

Who did all the visuals for the NIN tour?
Nate Boyce, who is now the guitarist in the Oneohtrix Point Never duo. Our power duo. He had all the crazy Warhammer stuff.

You ever play guitar?
Not really. I can kind of do some basic fingerpicking, I can shred in drop d. Other than that, I’m not particularly adept.

I’m curious, on “Bite Through It” there’s that tiny guitar riff at the end that sounds like a breakdown. Where’d that come from?
Oh, the dun dun dun dun dun dun? It was just an iterative resampling of a bunch of fake guitars. So probably stuff on this Chronos pad, a lot of emulated stuff.

Are most of the “real” elements emulated?
Right, there’s no “real” guitar on it. For the live shows Nate is playing with a Steinberger guitar with Midi pickups. It’s totally insane. But yeah, a lot of the time I’d start with a sample and work on top of that.

This band I dig, Wreck and Reference take these samples from everywhere, and crumple them into their own image and I think between them and your music I’ve realized that nothing is cooler in music than when the artifice becomes realer or more intense than what the real thing would do by itself.
That rules. That’s the whole thing of it. It’s played out but this conversation of authenticity. One of the first comments on the Rolling Stone interview for this record was “this isn’t real music.” And that was the typical Rolling Stone reader, they want to know what’s fake and what’s real. For me, it’s like I don’t know when that moment was, but I’m cyber. I’m predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There’s no authentic or organic.

You’re really funny about the press stuff. Like everything is orchestrated well in terms of what comes first.
Totally by design, yeah. All the peripheral stuff around this record, whether it’s Ezra talking on Twitter or like the interview I did with him and his blog and the things he writes. He’ll review R + 7 or review a festival. Kaoss Edge and stuff. When I was breaking down the Twitter, Ezra was the naive music blogger, he believes in Kaoss Edge. And you can tell this about everything Ezra follows. Kaoss Edge on the other hand follow Russell Simmons and all this Live Nation stuff because they’re a tenured fucking band. The career account. And then Flow, the tribute account who isn’t actually him, he embodies something between those two. He’s a poet, he’s a romantic. Following the most cryptic shit. And that’s why he’s so obsessed with being frozen or cryo. He’s not moving towards some belief but he’s not staying suspended in time.

But those things amuse me because I’m apart of it but I’m on the sidelines in a lot of ways. It’s interesting, I sampled Grotus on this record and the way I found out about them which I’m sure a lot of people found out about them was from Mike Patton championing them in 1990 or whatever. If you watch a lot of Mike Patton he’ll talk a lot about them. I’d be like “who’s Grotus? Oh, I’m Grotus!” Grotus is a thing in your career where you make good music but you’re not popular. The comedian’s comic or whatever. But I do like to toy with those ideas and the music industry when that happened.

I’m sure it was wild when that all started to pick up.
It was exciting. I don't envy the NBA imitator guy, in the driveway who imitates all these NBA players and captures their essence in a few simple moves. And like that must be the most stressful situations, to be on like ESPN and everyone’s like “what’s next now?” So partially it’s fun, but then you think you deserve it or it’s gonna keep happening, and when it doesn’t it’s like “oh no, what did I do?” Like you shouldn’t be that dependent on it. But when you do get it, it’s easy to get that trading card mentality. “I want more, I want this I want that.”

Being a music writer or whatever, it’s funny. You see all these other writers go back and forth online and become enraptured in it, and then like I went to Wisconsin for a week and it was like none of this hype shit matters. You can still like this thing, and not be enmeshed.
You hear the birds chirping and the sound of the creek [laughs]. It’s very easy to snap out of it when you get a taste of reality, like none of this is a concern except for a very small amount of people who it’s important to. We’re outnumbered by a lot of more important shit going on.

Everyone’s weird, it just depends how deep you have to get to it.
True, reminds me of Foucault, madness and civilization. Everyone is totally fucked, it matters how in control you are of hiding it. I genuinely like weirdos and norms alike.

It’s weird when I think of friends like that, I’ll catch myself and be like “wow I’m thinking of my friends as data.”
That’s true, you put them in a weird box. But sometimes they box themselves too, like there’s no difference between a weirdo that puts themselves in a weird box and a normal person putting themselves in a normative box. It’s still this self-imprisonment thing that happens in your functionality. One ideological side of the spectrum or the other is besides the point, the point is you’re enslaving yourself to some system of thought. I’m more interested in a freefall scenario, you’re plastic enough to adjust to different scenarios.

The whole moving around thing kind of ties into your music, doesn’t it?
Probably does. At this point being 33, I am who I am. I have this set of experiences that influence. When I make music I try to be as honest as I can to how I experience the world. Like how you arrange a piece of music formally. I tend to observe a lot of chaos or whatever, the fragmentation and melancholy. That’s the filter I synthesize my world view with. If I didn’t formally have that chaos and it was really linear, it would make my skin crawl. I’d think I was a liar. I think I had an obligation to listen to myself and notice certain patterns I see in the world and develop a kind of allegory to describe those things through music.

That’s probably why I think I connect with the music so much. These moments that seem like triumph on the outside that get shallower as the music goes on. Feeling really upset and watching dumb videos on YouTube and going further down the spiral of weird shit and feeling.
That’s awesome, yeah. [laughs] I feel like it translates for people who also hallucinate, who have this strange media hallucination which is a big part of it.

For sure. It’s so hard not to be bombarded by all these emotions.
And not want to kill yourself basically. I always think about the timeline on Twitter or whatever. I’ll never catch up and it brings out all this weird OCD shit in me that would otherwise not be a problem. See this giant amount of time truncated into an option that could open, and making this decision whether or not to open. That’s like a perfect thing I can use as an allegory for music. How do I truncate time or a musical idea into something that has options or can be scary or skipped or passed over. That’s just a random example, things I try to be aware of and see if they register in any kind of music. But those things are kind of vague, I’m not adapt to mapping out my psyche or anything. It’s enough good virile information with those memories of data, those memories of life on the internet or just fucking not. Going to the store and letting them embody the music.

Do you ever cry at YouTube videos randomly?
I’m not much of a crier, actually. You know, I tend to cry and get sappy on planes. I think it’s heightened because of the existential risk of the plane but I remember watching some shit movie and I lost it on the plane. Dunno if I cried recently or I cried at YouTube. Sometimes music will make me tear up. I teared up twice when I had just figured out Animals. It was like “this is it, this is as close to from thought to expression. I did it in my mind, it spoke to me.”

That vocal sample is crushing.
It made me cry. And when it does that, I think it’s probably worth sharing. If you’re not feeling your own thing, why do it?

How’d it happen?
I thought I was done with the record, and I played it with my friend and he said “all of it’s really good, but this one song is garbage.” I was like, damn he’s right. Gave it a couple of days, came back and decided to go really simple and write it with piano with a vocal melody. Worked really hard on refining the lyrics, and see what happens. I remember thinking about “Polly” by Nirvana, a really simple thing where you feel like you’re very close to the singer. And then I just cranked it out, it was totally weird. I remember roughly having this thought waking up one morning, and you know, you get into a routine with your significant other. Waking up and observing ourselves outside of myself, and realizing we both look at our phones separately in the morning, one facing one way the other facing the other way. That image of two people in bed looking at their phones together but completely separate every morning was just so devastating to me. Like I had to interrupt the situation, focus on it and see if it’s okay or bad but deal with it artistically.

I like the “Polly” comparison. Even though “Animals” carries all this weight, the main melody is so deceptively catchy.
I love that. That’s what made Kurt’s music so great, it’s all about writing a catchy song. It’s sad to think we reap the benefits of his suffering, and I also feel that same way about Philip K. Dick. The pleasure we get from a lot of his stories are a direct result of his addiction to drugs, frenetic pace of his writing is because of his speed thing. It’s sad because that stuff generates all this amazing work, but you sacrifice this amazing human being in the process.

I remember reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch where everyone is on this shitty dystopian planet, and they take a drug in order to be in a somewhat nicer place that also ends up being just as hollow and sad even though it’s “nice.” Even if it’s not a direct connection, it felt like a distant relative of Garden of Delete. The coldness in perfection
That’s funny because there’s a lyric in “Animals.” In the song, it’s like the movie The Fountain where it’s in two realities. One is a medieval scape with a king and a queen, the queen is dying. He’s realizing he has to conduct himself even though his wife will pass. There’s a servant that leans before the king and he says that her flesh is cold, and then she offers him something to eat after that. Which is very similar to what you’re saying, this thing where everything is apparently really good. You have servants and you’re a king or whatever, but it becomes very clear through simple observation that no one is spared from remembering how close we are to the edge all the time. Everything is about to break.

Does death scare you?
I was talking about it with my wife last night, and this conversation always occurs in that hypnogogic moment right before you fall asleep.

It’s the only time you can talk about it. [laughs]
Right? It’s off limits the rest of the day. [laughs] But I’m not really afraid of it. I’m kind of just, bring it on. Because who the fuck hasn’t died? Why would I suffer with the paradoxical nature of it. It’s reliably something that happens in this universe. There’s that title to the Emil Cioran book called The Trouble of Being Born. Like don’t think about the trouble of dying, think of the trouble of being born dude. Just as easily as you could have freaked out about dying you could have freaked out about having even arrived here. It is what it is.

This is going to be a really weird read, but I look at the music you make and the analog equipment you use, and the story and it reminds me of how the idea technology as something to connect us is a relatively new thing. But your music kind of goes against that. It’s about that loneliness, that disconnection from everyone.
It is a bit antisocial. Yeah. I think I’m a person that’s very pessimistic about, like I’m not a luddite but I don’t think we need to crack the code of technology and bring forth a future techno utopia. I hate that, it sounds to me like hippie cult bullshit from the 60s. It’s stupid, there is no future. The only one you need to worry about is yours, be a good person, respect other living things and deal with your shit. We’re not a hivemind society, we’re very far from thinking as one giant fucking Borg and to even think that would work for us where it would bloom some flower of peace. I mean, just look around. We’re just crazy little fucking narcissists. We’re all traumatized and carrying some evolutionary trauma from whatever. It’s a troubled place. So I tend to think of things a certain way, people look at me as equally histrionic as some optimistic perspective. But I don’t think so. All day I feel this acute uncomfort. All I have to do is pay attention to my body for three seconds and I realize problems. Something itches or something isn’t calibrated right. That’s what’s going on, if you want to live in something, you can’t clean the slate on this. You have to live with the garbage we inherited and be a good person, do interesting work or whatever that means to you.

Follow John Hill on Twitter at @JohnXHill