A decade and a half in the past, Daniel Lopatin shelled out what could be the most effective hundred bucks he ever spent. On the web, he’d come throughout a man promoting bootleg DVD compilations of decades-old TV commercials culled from Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime soaps, and late-night cable: Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Hershey’s chocolate bars, Heinz Alphagetti. Dated, kitschy stuff, thick with chintzy synths and VHS buzz. For somebody like Lopatin, obsessive about the cultural detritus of the late twentieth century, this was manna. He snapped up a handful of discs, ripped the audio with out a lot as watching them, and loaded the choicest bits into his sampler. The outcomes grew to become Reproduction, a tangled suite of ambient-expressionist fugues—ethereal, elegiac, unsettling—that constitutes one of many most interesting items of digital music of the brand new millennium.
The origins of Tranquilizer, Lopatin’s new album beneath his Oneohtrix Level By no means alias, are strikingly comparable. This time, it’s rooted in a set of economic pattern CDs that Lopatin discovered on the Web Archive within the early 2020s. He bookmarked the web page with the obscure intention of utilizing them in a future venture; then they disappeared, presumed casualties of a DMCA takedown discover, and he moved on. When the recordsdata unexpectedly turned up once more, the archive’s very impermanence grew to become a newfound a part of its attraction. “It occurred to me that even that—the disappearing and resurfacing—was one thing I wished to seize,” he mentioned. “I wished to seize the emotional register of an period the place the whole lot is archived however perpetually slipping away.”
This isn’t new territory for Lopatin. His 2020 album Magic Oneohtrix Level By no means, which was rooted in one other audio archive he found on-line, took as its central conceit the “format flips” that happen when radio stations change from, say, golden oldies to industrial nation. He framed 2023’s Once more as a dialog between his up to date and youthful selves, as a manner of interrogating the slipperiness of style and reminiscence. However Tranquilizer feels much less explicitly conceptual than both of these albums (to say nothing of the esoteric Age Of or the abrasive Backyard of Delete, with its elaborate origin story about humanoid aliens and a made-up “hypergrunge” band, full with backdated weblog posts, fictional Twitter accounts, and different assorted digital marginalia).
