“Alien. Less on. Alien,” goes the mess of textual coding on fictional group Kaoss Edge’s official homepage; a rabbit hole of deep web reverie. Here, embedded in the white noise are MIDI files owned and distributed by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Ezra the alien is an extra-terrestrial to whom Lopatin has collaborated with in a series of hallucinatory blog posts and questionnaires. The alien, Ezra, conducted an exclusive interview with Lopatin who consequently revealed the title of his latest record, Garden of Delete. 

 This aggrandised type of artistry, equally as self-aware as it is introspective, aids in painting Lopatin’s parallel universe. His playful PR push is essential in understanding Garden Of Delete’s sonic content. It’s non-music promoted by non-characters with downloadable MIDI easter eggs woven into a web domain supporting a non-band. In full, Garden of Delete is something of a machine malfunction. It’s an anomaly in the code. A gremlin in the hardware. It’s like listening to fiction or like communicating ideas through a made up alien called Ezra. Loptain’s affiliation with cybernetic drone and awkward ambience has been reviewed and reevaluated. Consequently, there is now an unparalleled directness to his music. No Good, Sticky Drama, I Bite Through It all teeter on lunacy. Everything overdoses from vocoder sampling and caustic Kronos machine manipulation. There is no context. No reference. Take what you will from it. If James Joyce composed auditory landscapes, it would be Garden of Delete.

Tom Watson