‘It’s dumb and broken’: Oneohtrix Point Never finds inspiration in AI’s faults

By Nick Buckley

Oneohtrix Point Never, aka Daniel Lopatin, will perform in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide in July.Credit: David Brandon Geeting

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“I hate to be an asshole, but we would have to define art and then go from there.” I’ve asked the intimidatingly well-read electronic music composer Daniel Lopatin if he thinks AI’s aggregated creations are art. We settle on a framework: art is anything with the divine capacity to move us emotionally. Termite mounds: art. A woodpecker’s wood pecking: music, maybe. “I f—ing hate woodpeckers,” says Lopatin. “Of course, machines can make something that will move someone else, or something else, for sure.”

Performing under his stage name Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN), Lopatin will headline Illuminate Adelaide’s experimental-music mini-festival Unsound in July – a niche program composed of artists who’ve likely stewed over propositions like the one above. Niche, but crucial. Lopatin exemplifies how the sounds emanating from festivals like Unsound eventually inform mainstream culture. He has Sydney and Brisbane shows, too.

Lopatin’s a seemingly incongruous collaborator for Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), the world’s most-streamed artist, but he’s essentially a superstar in the world of abstract electronic music. He co-produced or co-wrote 13 tracks on Tesfaye’s last album, Dawn FM, which they executive produced with Max Martin, the songwriter-producer of 25 US Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits by Britney Spears, NSYNC and more. By contrast, Lopatin’s tracks are fizzing, occasionally abrasive nebulas existing on pop’s inscrutable fringes.

“Even though I’m a geek, I’ve been obsessed with being cool since I was 13 or 14 years old. All of us f—ers – who think we’re so cool and aloof, dressing cool, making cool music – think we’re hot shit until we come home for Christmas and nobody knows what the f— we’re on about,” says the sardonic 40-year-old.

Lopatin’s albums are high-concept. His 2011 breakthrough, Replica, deconstructed capitalism’s repetitious morbidity by disfiguring ’80s and ‘90s television advertisements; 2015’s Garden of Delete chaotically deployed metal and techno; and his scores for the Safdie brothers’ films Good Time and Uncut Gems are anxiety-inducing synthscapes. His oeuvre can be compared to someone digitising the last 70-odd years of recorded music and then microwaving it for days on end. He values Tesfaye’s grounding influence.

“Abel understands the beautiful challenge of pop: ‘How do I remain interesting to myself and invite people in to have a good time?’. He will chide me and knock me off my little pedestal,” says Lopatin. “I want to bring that joy to my music and find ways to express a musical idea [by asking myself], ‘What’s the real f—ing point?’.”

Tesfaye appears on and executive produced Lopatin’s last album, 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, a wormhole discharging mangled transmissions of queasy FM radio nostalgia. Archival radio clips of oldies DJs and new-age spiritualists are garbled into fragmented interludes of American Dream developmental ennui. Magic’s “psychedelic radio” concept carried over to Dawn FM two years later. The latter album’s track Every Angel is Terrifying segues into a spoof trailer advertising the afterlife.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’s title and Lopatin’s stage name reference Boston’s Magic 106.7 FM radio station, which broadcast to his childhood home in Wayland, Massachusetts. His Russian parents settled there after fleeing the Soviet Union in 1982. Lopatin’s semi-professional keyboardist father gave him his Juno-60 synthesiser, and he inadvertently soaked up the European classical music his musicologist mother studied at Leningrad Conservatory of Music. He cared more for Nirvana then, but now hears Chopin’s Nocturnes and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos in his own compositions.

The musician has been experimenting with AI-generated music for his score on the new Safdie brothers/Nathan Fielder TV series, The Curse.Credit: David Brandon Geeting

His 2013 album R Plus Seven sounds like an inflection point between holy exultation and the earthly concerns of microchips and semiconductors – motherboards meet Mother Superior. Lopatin’s irreligious but finds conceptions of spirituality in music.

“Just having faith in wiggly air – that it would make us feel this unbelievably rich tapestry of emotions, simply from combinations of notes and vibrations – is already such an enchanted idea. It’s closer to spirituality than anything else, because you’re putting an unbelievable amount of faith in something abstract. You’re letting the abstraction speak to you directly as if it’s possessing you. That is a religious expression,” says Lopatin. “I think there is something really profound about being sublimated by technology. We talked about spiritual possession… I let [technology] course through me so I can feel what it’s like to be modern.”

For the MYRIAD tour supporting his 2018 album Age Of, Lopatin conceived a story involving AIs attempting to replicate extinct humanity’s culture and behaviour for entertainment.

“Lovecraft said we’d lose our f—ing minds if we could absorb everything at once. The joke of Age Of was only an AI can do that. But they would have to put it all in these horrible categories and it would frustrate them so deeply they would miss all the nuance,” says Lopatin, who has always been preoccupied with science fiction. He describes watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a “quasi-religious” experience.

“[I was considering] how impossible and futile it is to try to undo humanity’s mistakes, and what a horrific situation it is to be stalked by the future. That [made] a huge impression on me, it’s been in my music pretty much the entire time.”

With science catching up to Lopatin’s imagined dystopias, he has been experimenting with generative AI on his as-yet-untitled new album, but remains unimpressed. He thinks current AI is something to be experimented with rather than a horrifying, incomprehensible intellect.

“If you listen to OpenAI or Riffusion long enough, you get a sense of the company sound,” says Lopatin. “I like playing around in that world. It sounds like their particular dithering algorithm. It’s not mine at all. I’m there to essentially just exploit it, satirise it and twist it into my own disgusting form.”

While working on the score for The Curse – a forthcoming television series from Nathan Fielder and the Safdie brothers – Lopatin spent weeks playing AI-generated music to the avant-garde jazz keyboardist John Medeski. Only a deranged Elton John-mimicking track created by OpenAI’s Jukebox neural network elicited a reaction.

“Some of this shit it’s spitting out arrangement-wise is really, really crazy. And it’s crazy because it’s dumb and it’s broken. It’s not doing its job well. John said: ‘Why can’t we make music like this?’, and I was like, ‘Bingo’,” says Lopatin. “We have so much to learn from this stuff right now: about its failure to compute, about arrangement and incorrect choices, about lingering on an idea a little bit too long, about dissonant qualities in pop music… not even to sample [it], but to really think about its form and apply it to your own writing.”

Lopatin reformats vast arrays of music with computers, samplers and synthesisers. But the trick is that his electronics are really all about us humans: a child absorbing Dad’s synths and Mum’s classical CDs; a teenager obsessing over Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kurt Cobain; or a 40-year-old man laughing at stupid robots. Even when Lopatin’s stuttering digital arpeggios drill woodpecker-like into your skull, the “real f—ing point” of his music is that its divinity lies in its humanity.

Still, for now, Lopatin’s toys remain in the crib. “Everything is connected and thus everything has that divine ability [to move us]. The world is agile enough to show us beauty in all kinds of different ways.”

Oneohtrix Point Never will perform at Sydney’s City Recital Hall on July 14, at Brisbane’s The Princess Theatre on July 15, and at Unsound Adelaide on July 16.

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