Daniel Lopatin On Returning to His Roots as Oneohtrix Point Never and Working with The Weeknd

OPN’s ninth album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, releases this week.
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Courtesy of Oneohtrix Point Never

As Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin has cut a striking figure through the last decade of electronic music. The 38-year-old’s career began in the underground noise scene, when he released synth-laden new age abstractions, and has taken him down fascinating paths not often traveled by avant-garde musicians, like touring with Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails, scoring several critically-acclaimed films of the last decade, and working with pop music’s leading artists. As a new decade opens, Lopatin has reached the most unlikely of outcomes: he’s famous now.

“I see boys wearing OPN merch and I’d go ‘Hey, nice shirt!’ And they’d look up and see me and be shocked,” he laughs with a smidge of discomfort, recalling the encounters he’s endured in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint area, where he lived until recently. “They’re all graphic designers and cool people, and they all ogle me because they look specifically like me. It’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s not so bad. I think I thought about it a lot more when I wasn’t popular, to be honest.”

Lopatin’s perspective on his relative fame has been further altered by all the time he’s spent lately with Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd. While he worked on Tesfaye’s latest album, this year’s excellent After Hours, the two would grab coffee or go dog-walking in between sessions as Lopatin witnessed just how massive the power of celebrity can be. “He has people literally slowing down in cars for what they see as these life-changing celebrity encounters,” he recalls. “So what do I have to worry about?”

The two first came in contact after the Tesfaye watched Josh and Benny Safdie’s gritty 2017 crime drama Good Time, which Lopatin composed the nervy score for: “He was like, ‘I’d heard your music before, but now I understand.’” After Lopatin and Tesfaye both worked on the Safdie brothers’ Adam Sandler-starring adrenaline rush Uncut Gems from last year, Lopatin was brought into the After Hours sessions along with regular Weeknd collaborator Illangelo and even performed alongside Tesfaye on Saturday Night Live.

While After Hours was being completed in Los Angeles, Lopatin’s ninth album as Oneohtrix Point Never, the radiant Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, started to come together as well. “[Illangelo] would be in there doing arduous stuff at the eleventh hour, and I’m popping over there like Kramer saying, ‘Hey, I just fucked around with some synthesizers!’” he chuckles. After Lopatin returned to his NYC home they kept in touch, with Tesfaye giving his take on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’s embryonic state. “We had some very fruitful conversations,” Lopatin explains, “and after I went and worked on the album on my own, the conversations kept on going.”

That’s why you’ll find Tesfaye’s name popping up in Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’s credits with “Co-executive Producer” billing: “At some point, he said, ‘If it makes sense for you, let’s do a co-exec thing,’” says Lopatin. Along with leftfield-pop auteur Caroline Polachek and avant-electronic icon Arca, Tesfaye also throws in as a contributor to Magic Oneohtrix Point Never on “No Nightmares,” a distorted duet that Lopatin refers to as a “deconstructed power ballad” inspired by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin’s full-throated 1985 single “Separate Lives.” “It was obvious that he’s someone I can really rely on when it comes to honest feedback,” Lopatin beams while talking about the fruits of their collaborative process. “I love his perspective because it’s so wildly different from how he’s in the world musically, and that means a lot to me.”

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Make no mistake, though: Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is pure and uncut OPN—a return, of sorts, to the new age sounds he explored earlier in his career, dotted with decaying radio transmissions and a soft-yet-threatening technological glow. There’s a reason why this album flirts with resembling a self-titled release: it’s his most personal-feeling work to date, pushing his sound toward uncharted pop territory while recalling the refracted internet-native transmissions of his earlier work. “There’s so much of me on this—even the collaborations are appropriate [to when I started out],” he explains. “Everyone’s locked down, and they want to be creative online. Doing a self-titled record felt really appropriate for that reason.”

Courtesy of Oneohtrix Point Never

What have you reached for when it comes to detaching from reality during the pandemic?
At the beginning of quarantine, I was like, “I have all this time to catch up on my DVDs.” But then I was like, “I’m just gonna watch Neon Genesis Evangelion for the ninth time.” [Laughs] There’s something so disquieting about watching movies now—seeing people in crowds is a fucking nightmare. I don’t want to see people touching! [Josh and Benny Safdie]’s radio station Elara was going on around that time, and I did a mix for them which actually motivated me to finish the record. I was listening to Elara all the time. I’d hear people I know or people I heard about, and I was peering into the worlds of my fellow artists.

On a therapeutic level, I’ve always enjoyed the comfort of listening to the radio, and of listening to people have inane discussions on podcasts. It’s a way to have a connection to the outside world. I’m an introvert, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want and desire connection. I’ve always liked listening to the radio because it provided me that, and when corona broke out it felt more appropriate to listen and not watch.

Good Time was a very stressful film, and so was Uncut Gems. I find both oddly soothing.
Me too. We watch stressful things to remind ourselves how much better our lives are. I find mundane conversations with my health insurance provider to be stressful. [Laughs]

But it’s interesting that you went from soundtracking one of the most stressful viewing experiences of last year to making an album fixated on new age and background music, which are typically more associated with feeling relaxed.
I’ve been collecting these recordings from a website that’s an archive of format flips—the moment in which a radio station switches its format identity, going from an easy-listening station to a soft-rock station. People love these things. “1981, when W-Blah-Blah-Blah changed their format!” They’re symbolically loaded chunks of musical historical time. You’d hear the DJ and what his real name was, and there’s this dead air right before the format changes. I put all of these dead air moments throughout the record—eulogies—to make them say something that felt personal to me as far as my own career, as well as what was happening to the country. It’s disenchantment, but re-enchantment has always been the goal of OPN: to take something banal and boring and find the magic in it. That’s the magic part of Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.

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Background music, new age—I’m interested in that type of music. It has capitalist utility. New age music is interesting because it failed. It’s a product of 1960s hippie ideology. Its utility is usurped by its ideological underpinnings, which is interesting to me. The horizon that it’s reaching for—peace, solace—now that’s called cottagecore [laughs], but in the 60s it was the counterculture, in the 70s it was displaced, in the 80s it re-emerges as easy listening. I’ve always been interested in that stuff, and I still am.

New age culture can often come across as a capitalistic grift, too.
There’s a snake oil aspect to a lot of the recordings, because they have an essentializing affect. The music is devoid of the real. It’s purely symbolic. You’re buying an answer, and your despondency or depression will drive you to spend $12 to buy a tape or a self-help book. But you’re not really buying the solution—you’re buying the feeling of a solution. If you step away from the situation of being a good capitalist, you realize that there’s a lot of noise there, and I’ve always liked artists like Mike Kelly and Jim Shaw for collapsing elements of the real and the symbolic. I’ve always thought my music is part of that continuum.

As a fan, when you musically exhaust all your options—all the Berlin School stuff, the prog-rock records, the jazz fusion stuff—what’s left? You’re going to the 80s jazz records on ECM or the new age stuff, trying to find a diamond in the rough. We like those records when they’re good because they’re misunderstood or were packaged a certain way so that whoever invested in the record could make money. They transcend the problem of the genre. But the bad stuff is interesting too, and I like sampling it or seeing if I can use those textures as a contrast to something personal. There’s a lot of samples of The Weather Channel on this record. I like a mundane latticework that I can transform into something personal.

Nostalgia has been very present in pop culture throughout the last decade. What role does it play in your art?
There’s two key experiences I have with nostalgia. The first one is Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street, this vanity film he made in 1984. It’s basically a bunch of music videos stitched together with a loose plotline, but it’s a really fascinating watch when it comes to his psyche. He loved the music of his youth, and there’s a song called “Ballroom Dancing” that has a music video sequence with a psychobilly vibe—but it’s totally contemporary in the way that he thought it was cool at that time. And then there’s Quentin Tarantino, who I was completely obsessed with in my adolescence. I became obsessed with his obsessions of the ‘70s as a 13-year-old, which led to a deconstructed adolescence. I was very quickly and easily indoctrinated into nostalgia, for better or worse. But what’s more rewarding to me as an artist is thinking about nostalgia as a false memory.

Much like New Age, nostalgia fails to be an essence. It can be fun, but it’s fleeting and it doesn’t work out, because you always have to go back to the present. They’re fictitious memories. You shouldn’t look at that stuff and think, “Things were better then.” That’s the trick—they weren’t, your mind is just having a whole bunch of fun with all these symbols. That’s always crept into my music, because memory is fascinating in that way. If history is slippery and all these things are constantly transforming, that’s an excuse for me to have a lot of fun with genre. What happens if I take a power ballad and infect it with things that don’t really belong, but would within my own false memories?

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From your point of view, how has the internet changed over the last decade?
When people are like, “The internet was better [in the past],” “We need to go back to small communities”—give me a break. I was 12 years old, having a conversation that started in a chat room that went to AOL IM’ing, with this person who was claiming to be Michael Stipe talking about all this weird shit about Courtney Love and a car crash. I was getting catfished by a Michael Stipe impersonator on Instant Messenger in 1994. It wasn’t good then, and it’s not good now.

There’s all kinds of reasons to go back through the history of this technology, if you really want to depress yourself, and link it to ideologies—Ayn Rand stuff. I was initially excited to watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and then I realized I already know everything in that fucking documentary. And not only do we already know it, but we’re perfectly happy every day to get exploited that way every day. Things have changed, yes, and maybe there are certain things that were better [in the past], since there’s an internet addiction thing that some of my older albums have addressed.

I’m like a recovering internet addict, but I’m also making work out of it. We’re constantly making memes, lurking, and looking at nasty stuff. And the nasty stuff is interesting! It’s titillating, and all the comments are like a new folk practice of being able to say whatever the fuck you want. There’s something to that. People are deeply repressed and scared to express themselves openly. There’s so much pressure and self-flagellation going on online. Of course you have this underground with all this nasty stuff. It’s not that people are nasty, necessarily, but it’s a form of expression. We don’t know who’s truly nasty or who’s not. We don’t know anything!

There’s a whole generation of stuff we’re starting to wrap our heads around. Maybe some of the art we’re making will be very useful in the future—or maybe not. Maybe it’ll be useless. [Laughs] For me, it’s important to find some kind of balance. You don’t need to check out completely, go full cottagecore, and delete all your social media because you can’t handle it. You need to figure out what about you wanting to do that says about your psyche. It’s not all that hard to just let it all be there and not bother you.