Oneohtrix Point Never
Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Lopatin pampers and indulges himself, but without getting complacent, and when he steps out of his comfort zone, it's always for essential moves, on tiptoe, in an electric car, without causing a fuss.
We find the minimal elements of novelty in the first record (it's a double LP): an unprecedented use of drum machine, functional for digestion in mainstream electronic rotations, a nobility obligation as a leading name of Warp straddling the decades (the latest, opaque, elephantine releases under the Autechre brand should have decreed this); a timid approach to chart-topping black music, so far outside the very white pantone of Lopatin.
Here's No Nightmares, a nocturnal ballad that establishes the alliance with The Weeknd, twin of destiny, diegetic counterpart in the musical commentary to the jewel Uncut Gems, which purrs seductively with a vocoder a reassuring and morbid lullaby. Here, for the first time on the record, Lopatin's voice rises, echoing Roland synth overdubs mimicking a soprano in a swirling ascent: the trademark. If Oldani's sectarianism permits, we would gladly hear it on The Vibe.
And I Don’t Love Me Anymore, a boom bap, a less coherent but no less suggestive episode of the lot, crossing the century to bring the melancholy fire to the 2000s (some say they hear Salem, some even MGMT, some Crystal Castles), only to destabilize with the microtonal dissonances of a memory that distorts, always emotional. To temper the unprecedented cues, there are the usual oriental particles, remnants of a never cleared affinity for Sakamoto.

The style remains more or less unchanged, the poetics of sound fragments to erect angular and crystalline structures intact, heterotopias with waste materials as load-bearing walls. Thus, the inevitable Eccojam sounds as one would expect from yet another variation on the 16bit Sega Genesis theme of sea and dolphins, and the second record, having fulfilled the duties of a lyrical electronic superstar, moves nimbly like Ecco in a sea of deconstructed signifiers: his sea, the usual signifiers, the usual deconstructions. Lost But Never Alone plunges Carpenter's dystopias into depths of epic tackiness as deep as they are (the guitar solo is an eye-patch nugget); Tales From The Trash Stratum resumes the thread of the discourse on the virtuous skit, the skit elevated to song form, to art form; Imago and The Whether Channel feed the lo-fi cult for new generations from the 24h relaxing beat for studying YouTube channel, but warp it with bouts of white noise with ruthless realism, freeing it from any possibility of application; Wave Idea is ambient according to Lopatin: an inaccessible place of cuckoo clocks, singing birds, and flutes, disrupted by electric discharges and unsustainable plastic echoes.

For Magic OPN, the narrative pretext is an analog radio listening session, with its interferences, its jingles, the application of sound to power. An expedient as old as End Of The Century, which Lopatin reworks with a play of reality levels and focalizations that reposition the listener and the radio with a cubist touch: one will realize they have listened simultaneously to the transmission, the production, the sound context that contains the transmission, what contains the production, and have barely noticed the shifts from point to point in the universe, so subtle and refined is the delocalizing technique, now customary.

A record of confirmation rather than transition. Without the nervous peaks of Garden Of Delete, without the shocks of R Plus Seven (but the porngenesis of the pandemic in the video of Long Road Home is noted), or the virtuosity of Age Of, but with a pop sensitivity in potential that arouses curiosity for the future.