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Game of life electronic board game11/6/2023 Though he recently composed and performed music for a Chanel runway show, he dresses in a low-key manner-“I basically just want to dress like I’ve been dressing since I was fourteen years old,” he said-and has taken to wearing what he calls “Italian senior-citizen shoes.” He was brought up in Winthrop, Massachusetts, an oceanside suburb across Boston Harbor from Logan Airport. A long wall was lined with synthesizers of various vintages elsewhere, there were books, stacks of VHS tapes, and framed posters of Enya and of the 1972 sci-fi film “Solaris.” Lopatin, forty-one, is tall and easygoing. One morning in mid-August, Lopatin and I met at his studio, a bright two-room suite, nicknamed the Sky Dungeon, on the fifth floor of a former industrial building in Williamsburg. “Dan’s a sensitive person who’s also really interested in exploring the absolute upper limits of what’s possible creatively.” That’s the paradox,” the electronic musician James Blake said of Lopatin’s work. “It’s emotionally charged-even the stuff that sounds colder, more electronic, kind of icy. Lopatin worked on three tracks for the Weeknd’s “After Hours” (2020) and co-executive-produced “Dawn FM” (2022), two of the best-selling pop albums of the decade. But the two chief creative partnerships in his life are with the film directors Josh and Benny Safdie, best known for the tense thrillers “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” (Lopatin wrote the scores for both), and with Abel Tesfaye, who records as the Weeknd. “He definitely has a knack for making things weirdly beautiful,” Sophie Allison, the singer-songwriter who performs as Soccer Mommy, told me. In 2022, he produced “Sometimes, Forever,” Soccer Mommy’s third album. Lopatin has collaborated with FKA Twigs, Caroline Polachek, Arca, Rosalía, Charli XCX, Anohni, and Nine Inch Nails, among others. But recently he has become the person mainstream pop stars call when their records are getting boring, rote, or predictable. “It’s part of us.” The goal isn’t to thrash against disconnection-or to panic, the old human instinct toward mastery and subjugation-but to somehow integrate it.įor more than a decade, Lopatin has been a highly regarded composer within electronic-music circles, and worshipped in certain corners of the Internet. “The tragedy of our whole thing is that we’re very much contained in the unknown,” Lopatin told me one afternoon. There’s the honeymoon phase, followed by the bumpy phase, and then the moment where you need to make a choice: Am I hitting the brake, or am I hitting the gas?” That feeling-liminality, ambiguity, unexpected tenderness-is consistent in Lopatin’s music. Another is this kind of uncanny, romantic story. “One layer of meaning has to do with being sentient-life, death, forced entertainment, choices. “It’s the story of two lifeless characters,” Tet said. The video was directed by the French artist Freeka Tet. But the plaintiveness of those last two lines is somehow devastating-the tenuousness of our connections, how earnestly we try to maintain them. Lopatin has built a career writing elegiac, otherworldly electronic compositions using computers, synthesizers, and digital scree when he includes lyrics, they rarely feel confessional. If I empty my mind Do I scoop out my skull What gifts would I find Nothing’s inside Just a slug that provides A barely lit path From your house to mine. His voice is fractured and heavy with effects: The sequence recalls both a prenatal ultrasound and the Rapture. Maybe one of them gets to the button? The screen turns scarlet and sinuous, and begins to throb. The feeling is of utter helplessness in the face of assured disaster. The car is off course now, hurtling toward oblivion. A Stop button is affixed to the gearshift, but it’s just out of reach. At some point, the road gets rough and the dummies start flopping around. Their rubbery fingers reach across the seat for each other. On the floor, there’s an artificial-intelligence manual, a book about understanding computers, and a copy of “Erewhon,” the 1872 satirical novel that imagines a future in which machines achieve consciousness. Two CPR dummies wearing turquoise jumpsuits are strapped into a self-driving car. The video for “A Barely Lit Path,” the first single from “Again,” Daniel Lopatin’s tenth album as Oneohtrix Point Never, takes place on a dark road in a shadowy forest.
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