- Last Friday, the prolific musician and conceptual artist Oneohtrix Point Never, AKA Dan Lopatin, performed in Brooklyn for the first time since the release of his new album, Garden Of Delete. It went down at the intimate industrial space Villain in Williamsburg, as part of the ongoing Tinnitus Music Series, which has hosted shows from Holly Herndon, Autechre and Ben Frost among others. The concept-heavy LP makes numerous references to '90s grunge and metal (Lopatin himself has characterized it as his attempt at a "rock album"), so for the live performance he recruited frequent collaborator and guitarist Nate Boyce.
The show opened with Lopatin delivering a monologue over sparkling ambient pads, using an effects chain that turned his voice into a frightening alien screech. Monitors on either side of them cut between abstract CGI renderings of scrolling text and clips from the music video for "Sticky Drama," which recreates an epic sci-fi video game starring teen warriors in a dystopian future. The audience whooped as the first stuttering notes of "Ezra" rang out, building in intensity before diving into a barrage of battling guitar and synth riffs. His epileptic synthesizers combined with the strobe lights made for a bewildering start.
From there, the set unfurled erratically, moving quickly between stacked, maximal phrases and periods of calm respite. Some of the most compelling moments came when the thick layers of guitar and drum programming cleared up, allowing Lopatin's synth-work to stretch out by itself. He's got a haunting and beautiful sense of melody, and his technical skill both as a composer and sound designer really shone through in more delicate numbers like "Child Of Rage." The soaring trance arpeggios of "Mutant Standard" also made for a particularly emotional peak in the performance.
The show, like the album, was conceptually rich, and everything pointed back to its central theme: male adolescence. All of its musical reference points are hormone-heavy genres defined by earnest and intense feeling: trance, grunge and symphonic metal, as RA's Matthew McDermott pointed out in his review. During the more extreme moments, Lopatin's affected screaming sounded like the angsty wail of some teen goth frontman. Meanwhile, the bloody sci-fi narrative playing out on the monitors drew heavily from the boyish pastimes of live-action role-playing and Nickelodeon television.
More than just clever references to late-'90s youth culture, though, these bits and pieces point to an adolescent intensity that most of us as adults have long since buried. "All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever," Lopatin told THUMP in an interview earlier this month. "It was just a little message to myself to not run away from things that gross you out or frustrate you." What Lopatin succeeded in capturing is that excess of feeling—desire, fear—and the sense of urgency that makes adolescence such an emotionally overwhelming experience.
Photo credit: Maxwell Schiano via FACT