Oneohtrix Point Never

Interview Ari Spool

Photography Leonard Greco

Oneohtrix Point Never is Daniel Lopatin, a bearded gentleman who lives deep in the ever-de-wilding area of Bushwick, Brooklyn. OPN is a glittering landscape of aural technology, with different fevers and moods depending on the track. His latest record, Returnal (Editions Mego, 2010) features cover art from Sunn O)))’s guitarist Steve O’Malley and opens with “Nil Admirari”, a track that has screaming and crunching and a loud violence that turns all around you and rotates your brain on a rototiller. It then moves into the beat-free next track, “Describing Bodies”, leaving you below the soil, all smoothness, tonal harmony and oneness.

All three of OPN’s first releases have been packaged together into one super-release called Rifts (Editions Mego, 2007), and this is what first dropped on the desks over at ’SUP a few months ago. Daniel’s music can be somewhat challenging on the ears and some is so beautiful it will lull you to sleep, but that’s part of the point. It’s not about creating what one would normal thing of as a song per se, but it’s about playing with sounds and experimenting with noise.

When I saw him perform at the infamous MoMA P.S.1 Warm Up summer series, he was not enthused by the crowd. The stage was set at the top of concrete steps, so every single person’s back was to Daniel as he wove sounds around them. People were chatting and drinking. A couple of girls were just taking pictures of each other for the entirety of the set. The beauty of the music was overwhelming. What kind of fan of fine art doesn’t take the time to observe their surroundings? Daniel takes the time to do so in minute detail, and it’s obvious in his work.

I met Daniel in his apartment a few weeks before I saw him play. I pointed to a poster on the wall from an OPN performance in Norway and turned on the tape recorder as our chat turned to Scandinavian dairy treats.

Daniel: When you go to Norway, you have to try the brown cheese.

What’s the brown cheese?

It’s like the most pungent, fucked taste you’ll ever have. There’s nothing about it that’s food. It’s like drugs. It’s so weird.

Like the weird dirt taste?

Yeah. It brings weird things out of you. It’s not like it’s aromatic and clears your nasal passages or something, but it’s just so pungent that it doesn’t serve the purpose of eating. It’s just pure taste. It’s really weird.

What is it made of?

It’s cheese. Some kind of cheese. Let’s look it up. I don’t know. It’s really gnarly though. You have a little slice of it on bread.

Do they eat it on a brown bread or a white bread?

White bread. I just tried a little slice of it and I was like, ‘This is fucked. I can’t do this.’

In Iceland, they eat fermented pieces of whale that they bury in the ice and then eat later.

Raw?

Yeah, it’s kind of pickled or preserved, I guess. I mean, salami is preserved. Dry aged beef is preserved. Miso is just made of mold on soybeans. I wonder if brown cheese is preserved in that way. I’ve never heard anyone say that something like that produces psychotropic effects.

No! I might have been having a moment. [Fiddles with his Blackberry and then reads the result of his research] Okay, here it is. Gjetost. It’s 24 percent goat’s milk. They claim it’s the real goat cheese. Oh wait; this is not the right one! Oh yeah, it always comes in these tubes. Like a toothpaste tube. But I’m wrong. What I had was really pungent and insane, and this is the sweetest cheese ever. You put this on bread for breakfast. Okay, anyways.

I wanted to ask you what kind of non-musical sounds you find pleasant. For instance, there’s this new bag that Sun Chips come in, and it’s made of a different material. It produces this kind of crinkling, and I was just sitting in a gallery the other day, and galleries are the quietest places in the world, and I was just making this bag crinkle loudly and was thinking ‘This is the best noise!’ And it even says on the back, ‘Our new bag is louder because it’s compostable.’ And I was just thinking how much I loved the noise.

That’s cool. My brain definitely doesn’t work like that with sound all the time. Usually, when I’m not actively making music I really, really don’t want to hear anything. I look for other sense activities that are pleasurable. That said, I am really into sound, and I like training my brain to listen to really far away sounds. When I’m walking around, especially in Bushwick, it’s really fun to listen to sounds that are really loud somewhere, but barely audible in my general peripheral hearing. People laughing, or kids laughing, or kids screaming, or really reverberant construction or something. The further away it is, the more distance between me and the actual event, the more interesting it sounds to me. I also like just picking up on really nice, pleasing intervals. Like, I remember I worked at this bakery when I was in college, and there was a refrigerator: a gigantic fan and a gigantic refrigerator. Together, they would be pitched as to make a fifth interval, and it was perfect. It was some Om shit. It was like, ‘Ooooh.’ I would listen to it all day and think, ‘Yep, that’s perfect. That’s nice.’ I guess I look for musical sounds in non-musical scenarios. (Pauses) I’m trying to think of a really up close, tactile thing that pleases me. I like all sorts of factory electronic sounds. This one’s really pleasing [Daniel gets up from the couch and walks over to his modern LG refrigerator and presses a button at the top that makes a small ‘doo-doo’ noise]. Like, that’s amazing. It’s really elegant and amazing. You should get it on the tape.

That’s a really good sound.

It ducks out really nicely. The second note—

That sound is so designed.

Exactly. Super designed. And I like the idea that it was a business decision – that someone was like, ‘Yep, that’s the one.’

Like how Brian Eno made the—

The Windows stuff! Yeah! It’s sweet.

Would you ever consider that as a career? Making those kinds of noises?

I mean, I would consider anything as a career.

As in, not living in some shitty place in Bushwick (laughs)?

(Laughing) Totally! But that would be really fun, yeah. Sure, why not. I don’t find anything ethically weird about that at all.

But, in order to extract your fee – how much did Brian Eno actually do, right?

Oh, I don’t know. It’s super weird.

He’s super weird.

Totally weird! And he was using this one particular synth throughout the ’80s, and I think he was making his own sounds, but a lot of the stuff that I heard him do in the ’80s I recognized as stock sounds from that keyboard. That’s another level of ‘how much are you actually doing,’ you know? That said, he kind of has carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

If he thinks that a stock sound from a keyboard is the right sound–

Then it is! At the end of the day, if it sounds right on, then it’s done. It’s fine. I don’t like arguments that have to do with the authenticity of a composer, that’s just garbage.

Oh, we’re too late for that.

So late for that.

I don’t even think about it. I mean, in this day and age, we’re looking at everything on a flat surface. We’re not Medicis. None of us are Medicis. We can’t look at any one thing and say, ‘This is art and this isn’t,’ because someone is bound to have the exact opposite opinion.

Yeah, exactly. We’re totally beyond that at this point.

The diversity of opinion is too strong.

Exactly. And we still had kings and feudal systems at that point, so that kind of general, centralization of power felt more apropos in art. Now it’s just totally fuckin’ free-for-all.

You said that when you aren’t making music you like everything to be silent.

Yeah. Definitely! I think that’s normal. For instance, my Dad sits in front of a computer all day at work. And I’ll be talking to him on the phone and I’ll say, ‘Oh, didn’t you read my email, I sent it to you at eight.’ And he says, ‘Oh, I never turn the computer on when I come home.’ Like, there’s no fucking way, because he’s so constantly being blasted by computer shit at work. It’s just really simple like that. I don’t think there’s anything fancy to it other than I get really, really sick of having to listen really closely all the time. I like the idea of absolutely no distraction. For instance, I don’t listen to music. I listen to sports radio at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. Which is a nasty habit, an addiction. But I don’t like music when I’m trying to fall asleep.

What’s nasty about sports radio?

All night, as I’m sleeping, I’m getting all these commercials. All this subliminal shit is happening. It’s like Inception.

I’ve never listened to sports radio.

It’s extremely angry, with an affectation of caring so much about sports that you’d want to talk about it for four hours in a row. Obviously these guys don’t actually want to sit there and talk about sports for four hours in a row! Who would want to do anything for four hours in a row? So you hear them start repeating ideas because they have to keep going with it. Like, ‘Kobe Bryant… is not… the best clutch shooter… of all time. Kobe Bryant… is not—’ And they will just do that in this droning, monotonous way. I find it really comforting.

And they have callers, too, that will call in and say, ‘But Kobe Bryant is the best!’ or whatever?

Yeah, they have callers that are heavily screened. They are usually pretty intelligent. At least on ESPN, the callers tend to be heavily screened. But I used to listen to Boston sports radio, and it’s totally just bananas Massachusetts dudes.

I know exactly what you mean when you say ‘bananas Massachusetts dudes.’ Those people are more passionate about sports than anywhere else in the country.

Oh my god. They are insane people.

Passionate is probably not even the right word.

They’re just nuts. They live for it. They work, and then it’s like, ‘Sox, bro.’

Ha! No one should ever know about it. Don’t bring it up, don’t talk to people in Massachusetts about it.

I enjoy it! I definitely don’t relate to it. Sports is not the central driving force for why I want to live. But I like any sort of extreme, nerdy fanaticism because I think it’s pure. So in that sense, MA is kind of cool because it has its own little pocket of dweebish behavior.

They like the Sox and the Kennedys!

Totally!

Do you guys all make music in this apartment?

Yep! It’s always basically 24-hour music freakout in here.

You don’t actually get that silence you want, then?

Not really!

Have you taken any measures to prevent the noise that other people are making from coming into your zone?

[Points to a window that he cut in his room to the living room] Yeah, I’ve created this gigantic hole in the wall! (Laughs) No, I think I try to do a lot of headphones stuff. But I’ve grown so totally accustomed to the environment of this apartment being a loony madhouse of sound that it’s not really irritating. But when I do notice silences I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s so nice!’

Do you ever take any measures to get silence in your life?

I do, but it’s not frequent enough, and it ties into Massachusetts. It’s totally quiet, unless you live on a highway or something. I like to leave here a lot and I like to record in MA, so when I leave a session or something I go outside and it’s like, ‘Wwwsshhhhh—nothing.’ I try to go once a month, if I can. My parents live in Sudbury. I like to just chill there.

Do your parents like that you come to visit?

They love it! They can’t get enough of it.