oneohtrix point never

never not gonna ride for how this thing drops in. just perfect

https://soundcloud.com/fordandlopatin/heaven-can-wait-mixtape-vol-iii

let's take it back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDyjS1aTYDg

👀 pic.twitter.com/zldrlQZ2r2

— opn (@0PN) September 21, 2020

Bring it!

PHEW

thought that was forming MAGA at the end

that looks and sounds very cool! his soundtrack work has been so excellent recently, but i haven't really felt the urge to listen to them outside of the context of the films.

MAGIC

Just discovered this dude
In major love

Listen to eccojams!

listen to it all imo, he already has an incredible catalog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btBrj7O1zKI

^^ first three songs, a 'suite', is up. Stoked for the whole thing!

feel kinda bored by his whole deal at this point :/

yeah he's a relic of the 10s imo, accelerationist art used to excite me but it jumped the shark with his 'music CEO' tour for AOE which went in one ear and out the other, far less than the sum of its parts. GOD is my favorite of his, it pushes the ugliness inherent in his aesthetic to the forefront and fuses it with the beta-as-alpha male musings that now seem so lame. five years ago i would have said he is the GOAT so, ... i'll probably return to some midpoint between the two, deep in the negative dialectic at the moment tho

i'm a little on the fence about him. every time I listen to R+7 I go through the same thought process..."this is brilliant" -> "nothing's really happening" -> "wait, it's over?". a think a lot of his albums are like that. but man sometimes they really do hit the spot

Eccojams is the only thing of his I go back to
New one above leaves me cold, though I did like his last LP somewhat

replica is brilliant, one of my very favorite albums of last decade

and all his old Juno jams of course

Lol, tough crowd... 'Relic of the 10s', really?

'Replica' and 'R+7', and also 'Eccojams', are unimpeachable imo. I didn't care much for 'Age Of', I couldn't vibe with the aesthetics of the whole thing. But seems a bit harsh to write this guy off as a 'relic' when he's consistently been on the forefront of things.

I can fairly say that his gig at the roundhouse last year was one of the most mindblowing experiences I've seen live...
'r plus seven' I think is the one where he reached his peak, but 'replica', for sentimental reasons, is possibly my favourite.
'garden of delete' is the only record of him that I'm on the fence, although today I kinda get it why he needed to make it.

His back catalog is just so fun to explore. And the hit rate is incredibly high considering how much stuff he puts out. Excited for this new one.

ok now i feel bad esp bc my own practice is influenced by his. i guess i just felt burnt seeing him flirt with nick land-style techno-nihilism from a positive rather than critical perspective, and felt the park ave armory show reflected that and then AOE sucked so ... kill yr idols i guess

No need to feel bad, I think that's perfectly fine! I'm just entirely ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about people going "rip OPN, it's sad he was a relic of the '10s" after hearing a mere 5 minutes of the guy's new album.

If you're posting itt surely you'd have to cut him more slack than write him off based on an album teaser.

XP can you expand on that point regarding techno nihilism? I guess I’ve always assumed that because his music is so abstract that it’s hard to grok a political reading of it.

i thought the park ave armory show was kinda joyous, like a celebration of what can be done when art-industrial complex institutional money gets thrown around

if I'm honest I haven't flat out loved anything he's done since 'rifts' - but I kind of respect him for not sitting in that space indefinitely when he could've milked it

kind of got off the bus around R+7 but every so often I hear a track on Spotify and think I should give it all another go

I'm quite conscious that my ears evolve slowly and that OPN stuff that doesn't grab me on first listen often sounds better a few years later - which I guess is again credit to him as an artist who pushes forward/onward

i guess i just felt burnt seeing him flirt with nick land-style techno-nihilism from a positive rather than critical perspective

yeah i completely agree. r+7 was my favourite of his but garden of delete was a let down due to this and then age of was completely unmemorable

Age Of had one cool tune that sounded like a warped Devo song

all of the R records are great, glad to see other R+7 fans here. gonna be legit shocked if this album goes back to gorgeous synthwork.

yeah he's a relic of the 10s imo, accelerationist art used to excite me but it jumped the shark with his 'music CEO' tour for AOE which went in one ear and out the other, far less than the sum of its parts. GOD is my favorite of his, it pushes the ugliness inherent in his aesthetic to the forefront and fuses it with the beta-as-alpha male musings that now seem so lame. five years ago i would have said he is the GOAT so, ... i'll probably return to some midpoint between the two, deep in the negative dialectic at the moment tho

― Vapor waif (uptown churl), Thursday, September 24, 2020 4:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Wild stuff

R7 is my fave, maybe because it was the first I heard from him. I bought it mainly because I liked the cover so much. Wanted to like AOE a lot more, but something about it just didn't fully gel. You could feel that he was really trying to stake out some territory there, perhaps that effort made it come across as underwhelming. I showed the Black Snow video to my 5 year old last night and she was enthralled but scared of the dude's teeth.

Russian Mind is the best of the early albums. I admire Garden of Delete but rarely want to listen to it.

xp m bison

looking for links between zoom meetings and failing; but he did mention CCRU during interviews for AOE i am certain; if ur not familiar check this link

http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html

i feel like OPN is on the nick land side rather than the fisher side, and xp to lamonti, if you feel like my statement was ott, it was, but the whole constellation of capitalist-aesthetics-hijacking and irony-saturated maximalist art of the 10s (vaporwave, jon rafeman, james ferraro, ryan trecartin, DIS, UNO, etc) imo has a very nihilistic undertone and resonates with nascent alt-right aesthetics. it's not a coincidence that vaporwave has some insidious, shadowy followers. i think r+7 took that corporate MIDI thing and made it breathe, but i think his overarching vision is firmly in the right-accelerationist post-humanist borg thing which i am not into. see also italian futurism and its resonance with fascism.

sure sure, we can talk about to what extent artists have to have 'good' opinions on politics, but id rather .. not. really, part of my unease is how dope the shit is (except AOE!) in parallel with the icky stuff. same with rafeman and trecartin - absolutely love their art!

Not even sure where to begin, but I would love to see more direct references to the artist's intent themselves rather than the aesthetic re-contextualization within evolving political perspectives described above; seems subjective in its interpretation too much for me. Just because there might be some "shadowy followers" (source?) following vaporwave doesn't inherently mean the scene follows their vision back. I've always taken OPN's aesthetic and vision to be one that utilizes capitalist excess and manufactured, shallow aesthetics in combination with hazy nostalgia and analog technologies to create a unique anachronistic cyberpunk futurist atmosphere, similar to say steampunk

However, that said, I do understand how an ironic edge-lord meme culture can easily descend into taking its original sarcasm seriously over time, as that is what has happened on the internet the last decade.

All that aside, the new single sounds good! I was not a fan of Age Of, and unlike Arca, the introduction of vocals and more conventional musical structures detracted rather than elevated his work.

New single seems to improve on those shortcomings, but I do miss his instrumental, more abstract records. He's been pretty unimpeachable up until his last

similar to say steampunk

Didn't finish my thought here - similar to Steampunk's ability to take an aesthetic from the past and re-contextualize it into something romantic, ignoring or diminishing the nasty, polluting and dehumanizing side effects of early industrialization (rather than endorsing them). I see parallels here with OPN and vaporwave.

has a very nihilistic undertone and resonates with nascent alt-right aesthetics

good stuff, however - R+7 is kind of a touchstone opn album for me, in that it (as you note) pushes the vapid beauty of presets to the edge, until the emptiness can't be ignored. not as a nihilistic move, though - i think it's more about honesty of materials, trying to explore what these sounds mean (or don't.) basically it's gorgeous and real sad, without ignoring the energy and joy in the machines. for me it sort of makes all vaporwave irrelevant.

i'm also thinking of his RBMA Q&A, where he was almost painfully earnest (giving advice to a diffident questioner "you're a person, your point of view matters").

so basically i guess what i've always loved about him is that he explores the shallowness of our age, sometimes gleefully, but has never seemed nihilistic to me. i might be engaging in wishful thinking or selective memory tho.

octobeard otm. daniel lopatin is not exactly leni riefenstahl.

replica is still my favorite, but that's the one i heard first, so who knows. r+7 feels like confield to me, in that every time i listen to it i am confounded for at least part of the time, and there are always sections i swear i've never heard before, even though i know i have.

By any measure, I should love OPN but my authenticity stan made a decision as far back as Russian Mind that Lopatin is a phoney and no matter how many times I think 'right, I'm going in' I can't get that voice to shut up.

I’m half enjoying churle’s takes here, but it’s such an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction as to be basically meaningless.

Lopatin’s aesthetic is loaded and smeared, but he’s open about what he’s trying to do with his albums. Garden of Delete, through his alien boy concept, in his liner notes, in his interviews, is essentially about... the confusion of puberty.

Always found his stuff to be unusually tender. I understand the gap between intention and result, but if you’re laying down Nihilist and Fascist for this guy, I’m kinda checking out on that.

ok last post and I’ll stop derailing, apologies for the raving incoherence ....

of course I’m not obscene enough to suggest he is literally a fascist; I’m saying his work is part of a larger artistic and social context where meditations on techno-capitalist obliteration of humanity range from critical to strangely accepting, and over the course of his career, I detect a shift from the former to the latter that tracks with a larger social and cultural shift along the same lines (accelerationism, Peter thiel, curtis yarvin, the Berlin and athens biennales, the LD50 controversy, the current crop of ‘edgy’ anti-anti-racist podcasts like red scare)

'Relic of the 10s', really?

This made me lol.

I detect a shift from the former to the latter

having not followed lopatin's statements over the years, i haven't detected any shift, at least not a verbal or written shift. honestly i've just listened to his music - i haven't read the PR for any of his albums, and the ones that i own (pretty much all the main things up through R+7) were pretty threadbare in terms of any sort of annotative comments or text.

but maybe you mean other things that indicated a shift? i do follow 0Pn on twitter, but i don't really "follow" closely so maybe he hangs with edgelords

of course I’m not obscene enough to suggest he is literally a fascist; I’m saying his work is part of a larger artistic and social context where meditations on techno-capitalist obliteration of humanity range from critical to strangely accepting, and over the course of his career, I detect a shift from the former to the latter that tracks with a larger social and cultural shift along the same lines (accelerationism, Peter thiel, curtis yarvin, the Berlin and athens biennales, the LD50 controversy, the current crop of ‘edgy’ anti-anti-racist podcasts like red scare)

I’m saying his work is part of a larger artistic and social context

the similarities between his work and the vaporwave i've heard are pretty superficial. (i'm mostly not thinking of eccojams here.) they're using similar material for different purposes.

Angel please don’t go

https://i.imgur.com/BaZUa2m.jpg

i assume you're not posting eccojams stuff in response to my comment where said i wasn't talking about eccojams?

_of course I’m not obscene enough to suggest he is literally a fascist; I’m saying his work is part of a larger artistic and social context where meditations on techno-capitalist obliteration of humanity range from critical to strangely accepting, and over the course of his career, I detect a shift from the former to the latter that tracks with a larger social and cultural shift along the same lines (accelerationism, Peter thiel, curtis yarvin, the Berlin and athens biennales, the LD50 controversy, the current crop of ‘edgy’ anti-anti-racist podcasts like red scare)_

—-

Just chiming in to say that, without knowing all of these references, I appreciate this kind of reading and it feels right to me. It isn't necessarily the case that the artist's expressed intentions and convictions are the definitive way to address the artist's work.

but maybe you mean other things that indicated a shift? i do follow 0Pn on twitter, but i don't really "follow" closely so maybe he hangs with edgelords

the only one of my former students who is into that constellation of things is basically a communist, fwiw

He doesn’t. There’s a very ONLINE contingent from what I gather (like /mu/ and Fantano bois) that have glommed onto stuff like vapor wave, OPN, Death Grips and idk what else these days, but like, I’m not blaming the artists for that.

its unfortunate, particularly because one of the premier artists in that movement happens to be a trans woman and it's incredibly disheartening to see her do Twitch streams where the chat will randomly fill up with abuse, it's fucking awful