oneohtrix point never

Hasn't he collaborated with The Weeknd previously? Plus, both were in Uncut Gems.

i really loved the ford & lopatin cd but i think part of it was the compartmentalization of overt pop on one side and Synth Odyssey on the other. age of bridged the gap pretty effectively but idk about this one yet.

that's not to say there's not some nice sounds on this one. i'd be interested in others' edited-down versions. haven't listened quite enough to roll my own yet

At first I was happy to see you back, Left. Now I regret that happiness.

THERE IS NOTHING THERE. HE DOESN'T GIVE OFF FASHY VIBES. I'VE SPENT MY LIFE RESEARCHING THIS SHIT, AND NONE OF IT ADDS UP.

I will post this and then unbookmark the thread:

the non-rapping stuff on the new Salem album >>>>>> the singing stuff on the new OPN album

vibes are subjective & i didn’t specifically say fashy myself. he just seems like a certain sort of internet dude. anyway i remember liking r plus seven

okay, taken. sorry for yelling. i just get frustrated about stuff like this, for a lot of the reasons stated above. if anyone who has been interested in CCRU is suspect, then uptown churl is going to think a lot of people are fash, and that's just not true.

you can’t read. go back and read the frankel article i posted. you’re being silly. reflecting on the connections between art, capitalism, and fascism in 2020 is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. im sorry if discussing controversial ideas offends you, I guess?

In fact, let’s weave in contemporary Stan-dom and celebrity worship to explain why people like Brad and table can’t stand to even contemplate dark or complex threads in an artists output, no, it’s just “I like the cool sounds yay music makes me happy”

To repeat, nobody has called opn a political operative, there have merely been connections drawn between his aesthetic and some extra-musical ephemera to other larger cultural currents. The amount of hysteria this has resulted in is a real “doth protest too much” vibe. I never once tried to “cancel” opn which is what everyone seems to be terrified of

You write, "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."

Okay, so you say all this and then just leave it there like a turd on the floor. You never specify *what about* OPN's sound strikes you as nihilo-fascist, instead just stating that it has this undertone and expecting us to not challenge you (or Frankel) on it.

There are worthy critiques of the exaggerated mirror model that OPN and other artists have utilized, but what I read in your frothy takes is that your answer to the question of whether such reflections are politically necessary any longer is in the negative. I disagree, and find the pessimism with which part of OPN's aesthetic works to be remarkably imaginative and illuminating, and not glib or cold.

When Frankel writes in the end of that piece, "The real challenge is to instead do the opposite, to encourage social consciousness by uncompressing the driving forces of capitalism, making them understandable, and giving audible and visible space to figure out why some of us already live in dystopian conditions." Which, okay! I agree! But when I listen to OPN, this is what I hear— a making comprehensible of an immensity and quickness of digital life under late capital. Is it possible that the adoption of the auto-tuned singing is actually an emotive response, a sign of organic life and feeling underneath the digitial ooze? In "Babylon," during the most plaintive part of the track, Lopatin sings,
"It's not that I don't get it
I really think I do
We wanted it to be different
But that ain't happening any time soon
Mood spelled backwards
Says "doom"
(Help me)"

To me, that doesn't spell "I'm an accelerationist fascist," but instead reads as fear and a desire for connection. It seems to me that you and Frankel are willfully misreading/mishearing what's happening in the music to slander Lopatin, or justify a dislike of his more recent output.

I will say that artists explaining what they do and the philosophy behind their art is clearly not always a worthy exercise. The visual and aural aesthetics deployed by Lopatin and associates do not strike me as more on the Land side than the Fisher or Negarestani side of the dial, but that's mostly because I'm paying attention to the music and the visuals associated with it, and not whatever blithely stupid comment he makes related to CCRU.

Finally, it's important to note that the "delirious" qualities often ascribed to Land's work can easily be ascribed to OPN's. Sharing qualities (or even quoting early, pre-NRx Land) doesn't a fascist make.

So, what do you find fascistic about OPN's recent output, sonically? Or is it just that you're exaggerating a connection in much the same way Lopatin does and using it as a cudgel against his work?

Wait what

I'm way too fuckin stupid for the thread about the guy who makes cool synthesizer noises

jfc this thread

Is there an OPN thread for ppl who didn't go to grad school.

I liked the Weeknd song on first listen

has lopatin acknowledged biden as president-elect

lmao

when asked for comment, mr. lopatin responded: "synth goes whoosh"

while def too dumb to participate I would like to say that I'm finding this discussion pretty interesting

Lopatin is a Russian surname. It loosely translates to 'spade-wielding guy', a reference to his status as the gravedigger of Western civilisation.

I mean, tbph Whiney and others, I am kind of like 'synth goes whoosh' but find the idea of OPN's sound being connected to a neo-fascist movement so absurd that I had to push back.

I think he’s cute.

I mentioned above he's lost weight and looking quite spry lately. Good on him!

Photo from 2013 for reference:
https://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/oneohtrix.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iKPkxfljBY

safdie bros video

yeah dude looks real healthy these days which is great

video kinda fucked me up. part where the mom discovers the smart phone is weird.

ummm what is playing on the phone exactly

I think maybe it’s shown briefly in another part of the video? Somebody being buried?

Ah will have to watch again it kinda looks like someone getting their arm hacked off

I want an opo/safdie bros video album now

Opn is v funny on the twitter

Lol I guess he was on-site working in some capacity on the Super Bowl half-time show according to Instagram. Interesting career.

Musical director for the weeknd's half-time show

lol, of course

his latest album is probably the first one I've actively liked, as opposed to "it has some cool moments but I'm not quite sure what he's doing"

the song "I Don't Love Me Anymore" is great, maybe an anthem for my dumb generation

actually makes me want to revisit all his prior albums, see if I missed something

please check out Returnal for some gorgeous synthwork that doesn't sound too retro, eg Stress Waves

i've typed and then forgotten my love of the earlier stuff, but i believe it's just something like
- love everything through R Plus 7
- his first recordings through Returnal are very much of a piece and beautiful and still, somehow, underrated i think. what i love about this period is hard for me to find in his newer albums. i think he's moved on, and that's ok. he left many hours of great recordings to document this period
-Replica is brilliant. it is different than what came for, pointed toward what came next. I wish he would have stayed in this mode for juuuuuust a bit longer.
- R Plus 7 is also different than what came before, or after. It took me a while to love it, but I do now.
- everything afterward has been a struggle for me, and something where i return to specific tracks or sequences of tracks rather than just putting the album on

Agree with Karl on pretty much everything (except I loved R+7 right away)

I'm with Karl too, but I really love most of GoD. Everything after that has been lukewarm at best. Took me a while to get into R+7 as well. Replica was an instant classic and wish there was more of that era.

Everything up to Returnal has luscious retro-futurist component perfected that he's now trying to force into a pop framework. I feel that music would make an interesting soundtrack to a hypothetical production of Neuromancer or something. Very cinematic (which predicts his move into scoring films)

I get lost in the Rifts stuff too, but it's kind of like 2008-2009 James Ferraro...yeah, it would be cool if he returned to that sound for a while, but on the other hand there's so much of it there, I'm not sure what else he's getting out of his Juno at this point

can definitely understand why people don't like his last two, but I don't really get the criticism that they're "too pop"...maybe I'm way behind on my pop music but I don't know what else sounds like this exactly

I don't like the new one at all— think it's the most bland of his entire output.

xp definitely not "too pop" (although i may criticized the vocals above, so i can see how it would seem that way). i definitely do not hate what he's doing now, it's in the zone of "i appreciate it a lot but it's not for me". don't want him to return to Returnal either, because yeah, he Returnaled the crap out of the Returnal/Rifts vibe in ways that I can Returnal to again and again. Just kind of waiting for him to go out of fashion and then change again

pretty much how I feel too, karl. Replica is so awesome. I kinda had a feeling he would be going in some weird directions when that one came out. haven’t enjoyed it all but it’s at least been interesting.

I don't really get the criticism that they're "too pop"

It's a relative term for me. Harmonic, lyrical vocals structured in a chorus/verse form feel pop, regardless of timbrel experimentalism (see Radiohead's Kid A, the track for example). In that way, to me there's been a gradual push in that direction starting with GoD, when vocals were introduced with pop elements, though purely abstractly and with no lyrics. Age Of added lyrics. Now with Magic, you have at least one outright pop song! How is No Nightmares not outright pop? It's catchy, has a standard structure, and an autotuned Weeknd singing on it... I mean what else do you need to point to contemporary pop as a reference point? Yes the sonics are still tied back to elements of the OPN sound, but listen to any song on Replica, and then revisit No Nightmares.

Subjectively, I will say Age Of was poorly executed, and Magic is much better at integrating pop components into the sound, but what I loved about OPN and how I got into Lopatin's work was not because of pop at all, and I now seek out different artists to scratch the itch his work used to. Lopatin's still talented, but I do feel there's an identity crisis going on with the recent work.

btw, in case anyone goes back to Returnal, the first track "Nil Admirari" is kind of a fake out. it's hellish. I just listened to it at top volume on headphones, and it's maybe the ONLY time it has made sense to me, and that's because of my personal situation. it sounds like living hell, but you get used to it. then it morphs into something else. it's great, but maybe puts off people who don't OPN. if you're a person that starts on track 1 (like me), it gives the exact opposite impression of what the rest of it is

xp brimstead

have you tried R+7 much? it was the last one that seemed to follow up on some of those editing/found sound/repetitive/musique concrete stuff in Returnal

I agree and I think a lot of that crop of vaporwave/progressive electronic musicians are finding themselves in that spot right now. James Ferraro's new stuff gives me that same feeling, I just don't quite get what he's trying to do anymore. I don't really know where OPN is right now, the album is kind of schizophrenic and I've noticed it seems to reference pieces of everything he's done in the past, which doesn't make much sense as a whole. But I'm still enjoying it.

in Returnal

in Replica, i meant!

sorry, listening to Returnal now and had it in my head

His whole catalog is p good to great. 'Garden of Delete' and 'Age Of' are the best tho

wow

I know I've banged on about this before, but y'all need to hunker down with the Good Time soundtrack

my subjective opinion is that anyone who thinks the new one is better than Age of has no idea what they're talking about, "Babylon" alone is better than anything on "Magic"

facts