oneohtrix point never

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

the vaporwave aesthetic has a broad appeal, i don't think you can pin it to one particular demographic (besides nerds)

True but it’s one of the first genres to be born exclusively online, the “scene” is all virtual so it makes sense that some of that online ugliness would manifest itself

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

This pretty much describes my child.

Are they on-board with the edge-lord alt-right elements of those communities? If so, my sympathies. Wouldn’t begin to know how to navigate that as a parent.

Definitely not alt-right

Are Death Grips really popular with the alt-right? That seems odd.

Some extremely odd and offtm posts in this thread, which is sad because new music from OPN should invite anything but! If edgy/disaffected kids on /mu/ and similar spaces online liking your music is grounds for being labelled a fascist or techno-capitalist nihilist, then 99% of the musicians enjoyed and discussed on this board are guilty of the same crime. I don't necessarilyyyy disagree with the idea of "Vaporware as part of a murkier, larger artistic trend/scene with some potentially troubling connotations and adherents that may tend to lean alt-rightish"... but trying to frame Lopatin as some emblematic nexus of that already vague and hard to explicitly define online cultural "phenomenon" or "scene", let alone putting him personally anywhere even remotely adjacent to any alt-right/nihilistic/problematic ideological ballpark himself? All based off of (as far as I know and can see from posts in this thread) nothing but his music and perceived stylistic changes in it over the years??? That's a disingenuous if not unfair/unhealthy characterization IMO.

"Relic of the 2010s" is also maybe the silliest phrase I've ever read on here, and it seems obtusely.... just not even remotely true of the type music he makes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think a huge part of the appeal of OPN is that it straight up doesn't quite sound like anything else released around the same time period, Electronic/"Indie"/P4K approved/Warp/Ambient music or otherwise. At least to me personally.

I mean, he is dating one of the Red Scare girls. Make of that what you will. Anyway, I wouldn't worry. I'm sure his politics align with yours. Everything is going to be fine.

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

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/39904/1/oneohtrix-point-never-age-of-interview

mentions ccru stuff and anhoni getting fed up with his nihilism

http://straylandings.co.uk/articles/de-harmonia-mundi-and-the-end-of-the-world-oneohtrix-point-never-barbican

this gets at what i am trying to say - "Lopatin’s complacent visions of the future are frequently paired with a belief that through an exaggeration of these visions, image and sound become transgressive, and therefore radical. His collaborative track with Jon Rafman, Beta Male (which premiered on 4chan) is an excellent example of this thinking: a worst hits of the Internet played out in flashing strobe images of furry pornography and grime-filled keyboards. If the intention was to hold up a mirror to male online culture, then instead of looking away in horror, the boys looked on in perverse fascination, indulging in their own self-debasement."

anyways sorta weird that doing anything other than regurgitating an artist's marketing gets you branded as a canceler these days, its a weird inverted death of the author sorta situation we are in post social media or something idk

haven't really enjoyed him since replicas (r+7 kinda dry for my taste, returnal and zones w/o ppl are my favorites)

based on a tiny snippet this one looks like an exciting return to form

does anyone want this numbered lithograph i got? i have #4/150. you can have for free if you pay for shipping.

https://share-good-vibes.com/2015/11/30/oneohtrix-point-never-sent-us-a-super-rare-numbered-poster-to-celebrate-the-release-of-his-new-album-garden-of-delete-warp-records-weve-decided-to-give-it-to-a-dedicated-fan-so-were-holding-a/

opn dating dasha is the funniest thing ever

xp that frankel piece is p incredible, thanks UC

stoked for the new record

...don't give up now
we're PROUD of who you ARE
don't give up
you know it's NEVER been easy...

;_;

The Frankel piece was definitely good reading and shines more light on where you are coming from, UC. Thanks for the link.

One of the interesting parts for me was in the critique of retro-futurism:

The Barbican’s asymmetrical screens displaying the warped bodies of some- could be 80’s children’s TV show, make me want for an end to retrofuturism. As Benjamin Noys writes: “What we don’t manufacture any more is the future. Instead we dwell in a generalized nostalgia…”

This is a fantastic quote, one that resonated with much frustration I've seen lately, but it makes sense. Right now we live in a world that is very corporate and deliberate in how media and entertainment are manufactured at all levels with algorithms and committees largely driving consumption choices. Much of what we see focuses on our past, or fetishizes the nostalgia of it. Vaporwave is obvious here, as is Hollywood's focus on the MCU and reboots, or television series focused on historical fiction. We live in times that are so out of whack with the norms and creative bursts and unpredictability of contemporary trends that we've slipped into subtly into this state of manufactured reality and media with a de-emphasis on realistic, constructive near future world building. I suppose part of that is due to how ugly, unpredictable and unprecedented of a world we are currently in and how almost comical and unrealistic an optimistic future sounds to us right now. Normalcy is now an escape. And the only place that is "normal" to us now is the past. In this sense, the visuals and sounds of OPN's new single, which are leveraging retro-futurism for the first time since R+7, and blatantly so, seem a bit short on originality of vision, despite really enjoying what I've heard so far. But I can certainly see the appeal in these times. An OPN fan service album? Gotta eat I guess.

I was never much into the surface aesthetics of Age Of musically, so I didn't delve deeper into the narrative and philosophical or political intent, from Lopatin's perspective or otherwise. Now, I see a ton of parallels in terms of scope, vision and attempted execution with Holly Herndon's recent work on PROTO. A ton of crossover of themes, but the live performance of her work seems far more visceral and unnerving in its integration of religious ritual and AI while simultaneously engaging involved audience interaction. The cult-like feel and unease I felt experiencing Herndon's techno-dystopia wrapped in religious ritual was unsettling but original and very exciting from an artistic standpoint.

I also find the philosophies and stark, cold visions of the future that Herndon and other artists like Grimes proffer to be an interesting and entertaining expression rather than a deeper endorsement. In various interviews from each artist, they've said they don't necessarily want this future, but find it inevitable or likely, and thus feel a need to express some form of acceptance or vision around it in their art. I am also skeptical of the Schroedinger's Cat idea that by expressing this view as a form of art you are encouraging that view to come into reality, much like reading science fiction, but perhaps this is coming from a position of naivete, privilege and conscious intellectual escapism whilst taking in the work as art and I'm in the minority. I'm not looking at Age Of and PROTO as radical endorsements encouraging a particular path for the future, but more of a "this is likely where we're going, what can we do with this as a canvas for creativity" situation. In that context, it's nothing more than what science fiction has always been to me, and it should be lauded even if the vision it creates is nightmarish and achievable, a la 1984. And while yes, Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, other works of Science Fiction could be seen as warnings even if it wasn't the author's intent.

Not all art needs to be urgently revolutionary. Though as our times get more desperate, I can see people being overly sensitive to art that isn't "trying to do its part to help" and this is the vibe I'm feeling in this thread.

Track list, credits and whatnot

Much love and admiration for everyone that made this record possible under crazy circumstances— this record means the world to me. MAGIC ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER comes out this Friday on @WarpRecords , credits below 🩺🖤 pic.twitter.com/4B3ClJDrml

— opn (@0PN) October 26, 2020

Robert Beatty doing the art. Yesss

given this a quick listen and... i quite like it? i mean, it's not too different from the stuff he did with Replica in terms of concept, but for an artist i've often struggled with, i could imagine myself getting into it more than much else he's done.

lol'd at this week's tone glow where the reviewer roundtable smugly shit all over this record. none more disdainful than an experimental artist presented with a more successful experimental artist.

psyched to listen to this

lol one of the main takeaways from skimming that roundtable is that people are really mad that he signs now

Generally if a piece of music writing has the word "I" in the first sentence, I usually stop reading, real talk. Save it for your dream journal.

― wooden shjipley (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 11:21 AM (eleven years ago)

this whiney post is often on my mind whenever I read tone glow.