ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
Islington Assembly Hall, London | October 3rd
The music that Daniel Lopatin makes as Oneohtrix Point Never is a form of uncanny valley electronica wherein the hallucinogenic repetitions of Terry Riley graft themselves onto knowingly-pseudo-new age jams via Editions Mego style glacial drone moans. It’s a sound so entwined with the corporeal realities of life lived in, literally within, the digital age, that prior to this performance the transition from being a listener to a viewer seemed a problematic one.
In the gorgeous confines of Islington’s Assembly Hall, these preconceptions, these worries that the genuine weirdness of OPN’s music would be replaced by a forced sense of strangeness, dissipated. Opening with Still Life, one of the recently-released R Plus Seven’s undoubted highlights, with its jarringly juddering chords, chords that tonight sounded like a tectonic shift, and constructing a set that consisted largely of tracks from that record, it was a masterclass in tension, in the relationship between restraint and release. There are points when the intentional disconnect of the ever-present-on-record massed banks of wordless, pre-language, choral voices, of digitized chirrups, of groaning synth washes are replaced by lucidly rigid arpreggios and swinging kicks, taking us into almost-techno territory, recalling Pete Swanson’s continued explorations of the divide between Noise and the dancefloor. Though the selfish part of you wishes that things would go full throttle, that Lopatin would whack out a nice, clean flat 4/4 and a 303 bassline and get fully acidic, the rational, sensible part of you appreciates that these moments of controlled-flailing working because they’re limited, not in spite of that.
The audio/visual nature of this gig can’t be stressed enough. Recently Lopatin, always a musician concerned with the interplay of the audible and the visual, has been working with the artist Nate Boyce. This collaborative relationship is pivotal to his current live set-up. His hyperreal approximations of household objects hint at Lopatin’s sonic explorations of disintegrating domestic spaces, the epileptically stuttering logos – all of which belonged to late-80s/early-90s video game development studios – make the implicit virtuality of the music explicit, spherical variants expand and contract as if living. A perfect combination.
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Words: Josh Baines
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