Lopatin’s patchwork panoply of snippets and songs in collision is kaleidoscopic, peaceful, and placating.
The purloined production of Daniel Lopatin’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, “recorded”/constructed in pandemic-imposed solitude, is suffused with dizzying, sumptuous static redolent of a sibilating station of FM radio (i.e. New England’s Magic 106.7, the basis for Lapotin’s mondegreen moniker), and this static subjoins the disparate and truncated bits of sound that vacillate in and out of existence in fumes of noise. Lopatin’s patchwork panoply of snippets and songs in collision is kaleidoscopic, peaceful, and placating; it sounds like a transmission from beyond time, unmoored from any era — an epoch-eluding realm of antiquated equipment and artistic insolence for traditional form and function, where we all live alone and listen to the erratic whims of a public radio record-spinner culling from a cadre of whatever, not unlike the work of Jean-Jacques Birgé, or John Oswald (who described his defalcation as “cinemaphonically-concocted aggregates of très different but exquisitely manifest, unprecedentedly varied festerings of audio quality…”). Magic offers an eclectic array of aural stimuli: voices intoning, voices rapping, voices pleated into the tapestry, even something sort-of-like-classic-rock transmuted into something sort-of-alien-yet-familiar, in the final passages of “Lost But Never Alone” — which sounds like a song you once had stuck in your head or a line from a movie that you know, but whose title nevertheless proves elusive.
Published as part of Album Roundup: Oct. – Dec. 2020 | Part 2.
