Getting to the thrash point: a conversation with Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never

Emily Yoshida: So, let's just get right into the album. The theme is pus, right? Can we just say the theme is pus?

Daniel Lopatin: The theme is pus. It's things that leak that can't be contained.

Is that metaphorical, or are we really talking about acne and puberty?

It applies to so many fucking things. It's amazing to me how many things it applies to. I remember reading this great philosopher named Julia Kristeva, a French feminist philosopher, and she says — generally, she says a lot of amazing things — but in this essay called "Powers of Horror" she talks about the abject things that come out that we have desire to see. So the things that we try to contain within us is like this pre-semiotic reality and society is the way we want to present ourselves. Like, we wear clothes, and things are not coming out, there's no excrement or whatever.

And yet, when the stuff comes out — like, you sneeze and you kind of want to look at the napkin for a second, and that's like a really human thing. So, I was like, that is just incredible: we have this fascination with the primordial part of us that we [think] we've gotten away from, we've evolved from, but [we haven't]. It's just still very much a part of us. So I started thinking, that's a good formal constraint, like how do I kind of vaguely represent things that leak or things that are kind of disgusting but still seductive? But then there's this other part of it which is like, leaks or things that can't be encrypted or things that aren't secure, which is such an issue.

I feel that general concern really started to come to a head last year. Even situations that weren't literal hacks or leaks still felt like a part of this moment where everything was just seeping out.

Seeping out! Seeping out is this thing that's on everyone's mind. I keep talking about it as trade routes, all these really complicated things that are really challenging the way we think about ownership, like "Whose idea is this? Who owns an idea?" or who owns some ephemeral piece of data. And that obviously affects musicians who make recordings and then try to sell them to put bread on the table.

One of the things I wanted to experiment with was in this kind of sadomasochistic way was to take the MIDI from the album — which were really just the main progressions, just a piece of a melody from each song — and put them out into the world ahead of anyone hearing the record. Which is really weird, because essentially you're letting other people not even have your music, but author the armature of your song, the core spirit of your song. So you're just putting out the data that is that melody and letting that exist first. So the first things that anyone ever heard from this record, essentially, were other people's interpretations of my weird core stuff.

It's like releasing fanfic for something before the actual thing comes out.

Exactly. It's like if [J.J. Abrams] was like, "Here are the main components of how to make a Star Wars movie, now do it without having seen [The Force Awakens]."

I feel like people do that anyway; people make up this really vivid version of something in their imagination, while they're looking forward to it.

That's what I'm saying ... those are the complicated trade routes of the world that we live in, so to fight against that, in my opinion is a little bit problematic, like, it's better in some sense to let that generate all kinds of variety.

That sort of opening of the floodgates — sonically, you have like so much more stuff going on in Garden of Delete. I'm sure that many people are going to read it as a reaction against R Plus Seven, which was very clean and precise, even down to the music videos and visuals. Did you feel like you had exhausted that area of inquiry?

I think there's a couple layers to that. One is, I made [R Plus Seven] at home, at the start of a relationship, so it had this quality of domestic bliss to it, it was a calm record. And I had some demos, and I played them for my girlfriend, and without even her giving her opinion, I was like, "Oh, they're shit. I can tell." Because she was in the presence of them and the contrast was wrong, to me. I was like, "No, I can't, this can't be the music. It needs to be more like her." For a number of reasons that I won't go into, that record is very much inspired by her, but [it's also informed by] us spending a lot of time indoors, and you know, learning to live in the same space as each other.

And working in the same place that you're having a relationship.

Yeah, so, [for Garden of Delete] it wasn't like, "I'm going to go to the bro zone," but [she] kind of was a little bit like, "I think you need to like go spend your 15 hours in this dungeon." And so when I am here, there's very little outside mitigation happening, so I tend to be way brattier and more ridiculous.

The other thing was that I went on this tour with [Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden]. And seeing those two bands — very different bands, all other opinions aside — seeing them play and generate all this energy, and the physicality of a huge Live Nation amphitheater show, I was like, "Whoa." I just want some kind of primal seed to return to my music. And that's going way back to like, early Rifts era stuff, because that stuff was, in a weird way, a lot of the time rough and visceral. I was like, "How do I kind of go back there, but write these songs? Just really write songs."

Tell me a little bit about the whole internet mystery you constructed around the album. That seemed like it must have been super fun to come up with.

Exactly. That's it. It's just nice to hear that. But that's what it is. Like, you finish this record, and you're like "Oh my god, I have five months to wait for this thing to come out," and you want to do something meaningful, but also you want to just shred. Honestly, you want to just have fun. And do something awesome. So all of that stuff is a collaboration with my friends. Some of which — like, my dearest, my closest friends who live other places or we have different lives — I haven't gotten to get together and do crazy projects [with] since college. So part of it was like an excuse to go deep with my friends and finally do these things we've been talking about for years.

But also it was very natural to create this universe of weird stuff around the record. There was a sample, a sample that sounds like "Ezra" — not by design, it was just something that I found. So then, that's an excuse to just deal with Ezra: okay, that's a character, just go with it.

It fits in with this kind of unspoken cultural continuum, where things that are theoretical and abstract are on one end, and things that are more "pop" and rely on narratives and characters exist on the other end.

But everything is so mutable, it's synthesis. It's like, I decided to connect this abstract thing to this really affectively charged thing, this really psychological thing, or like, this idea or this history, all of those things are like these little modules that I can play with and connect the history to the sound or like, a fictitious story or a texture to a riff or whatever. Everything is plastic to me.

That included fabricating whole genres for the album — how would you define "cyberdrone" or "hypergrunge"? And how did they develop?

So, "cyberdrone" was because I needed a way of describing the thing that I wanted to perform on the Nine Inch Nails tour. So I was on the phone with Trent Reznor, and I was asking for his blessing to do this drone set, and as I'm like, verbose and I'm trying to explain this thing, I'm like, he must think I'm a complete fucking idiot. So I was like, "It's cyberdrone," it's basically like this really mechanized version of this thing I used to do, which is like loop some nice intervals or some nice modes together. It was gonna be this weaponized version of these drone sets I used to do in like, the basement of some Boston kid's house. So that was just a convenient way of describing it.

"Hypergrunge" was more specific, because a lot of the peripheral ideas about this record are like very directly dealing with observations in the music industry, and grunge is like, an insane thing, because it's a fallacy, it's totally fabricated. All grunge is hypergrunge. It's been synthesized by all of these marketing factors. You know about grunge speak? Or the story of grunge speak? There was a secretary at the Sub Pop office in the '90s, she was always getting interviewed because journalists would just come in and be like "So, what's grunge?" And she got sick of it, and she started tricking them or lying to them, like "Yeah, there's a whole language to grunge, dude." And she made up all these words that were like, grunge speak. [The New York Times] went and published this thing that she tricked them with, and I was so inspired by that.

And so when I was thinking about making this record, I was like, it's gonna basically take certain formal characteristics of stuff that happens a lot of alt-rock, certain techniques that I would hear, like really simple stuff like vamping over a bass line that's changing but keeping the vamp similar, or a chorus on a metal ballad ... Another thing I was thinking a lot about was Dimebag Darrell, the dude from Pantera, and Texas-style playing, which is like all the bells and whistles — dive bombs, pinch harmonics — all these things that we hear and we were like, "Wow, that's so amazing." But he actually kind of indexed them and figured them out, and I was like, how do I do that with a sample? So that's kind of what hypergrunge is, it's a tactic for taking a history that consists of many different ideas and doing something formally idiosyncratic with them.

All those things are kind of ways of narrativizing, right? Like creating a build, a sense of something to look forward to. More peaks instead of these sort of waves you've been working with before.

Oh yeah, totally. I think it was just generally wanting to speed things up, just get to the point, get to the thrash, the thrash point. Get to the chaos.

I feel like I need a whole lexicon for this album.

"Thrash point" is great. Thrash point is like a synonym for Kaoss Edge. Some kind of apex.

I imagine fabricating a language for this album must be pretty freeing, as far as you have to define what you're doing.

I mean, that's just something I always did, but I guess I'm being extra explicit about it now, or being more of a dork. I think before, I thought, "Nobody needs to know about all this other stuff." But I feel like the way I actually converse with my friends and all that is on display in this record.

Is it weird, seeing outside parties then try to parse all this? Or seeing the people who have done the detective work and gone through the rabbit hole with the MIDIs?

It's really impressive. And there were some moments that like teared me up. There's some beautiful, beautiful rendition of the MIDI from Mutant Standard done for horns, I think it's trumpet layered, it's so cool and so beautiful, it sounds like funeral music or something, it sounds like Henry Purcell. So there were moments like that. And then there were moments where I was like, "What? You people are insane, what are you thinking?" But I loved it. I generally kind of yearn to connect more these days than disconnect, I think for a while I was like, "I'll just do this thing and whatever happens, happens." But recently I really wanted to delineate who the people are that really care about my music, and I feel like they deserve to be closer to it and have more.

You just came back from another stint at EMPAC [Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center] at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [RPI] to develop your live show. I can imagine it's pretty dramatic to take new music there for the first time, after being in the studio for so long.

Oh, dude, tell me about it. Coming back from there still sucks. It really was awesome this time. We had 10 days, which is much more then we had previously, just in a big black box type room with a really good PA, and the first five days were just thinking about the record and transforming it into a concert and just trying to think about what works. Just hearing it on the PA and mixing it, sitting there, is so different than [in the studio], so you really understand what works and what's flat. Then there was me learning about DMX, which is like MIDI for lighting, essentially. It's the signal that provides the lights.

It's like programming?

Yeah. So, obviously, it's RPI, so there are these mad geniuses running around, and they want to help you, and it's incredible. And so there was this really wonderful technologist guy named Eric, and Eric basically wrote me this Max Patch — it's really simple, and I'm sure many EDM dudes do this stuff, but I had no idea because I never messed with lights before. But he Max Patched into my built-in session, and I can map and stripe all of these strobe effects to the music. And he just taught me how it works and I could mess with intensity, duration, rate, colors, like RGB colors, so that was kind of fun.

"There's all this wipeout potential — which is awesome and exciting."

Do you think you would have been into that for any album before this one?

No, because there wasn't enough syncopation to warrant any kind of insane strobing. Although we did strobing with video, so that would be like Nate's [Boyce, Lopatin's visual partner] job, to do video, and he would strobe it out into these hallucinatory rhythms. ... Before, [the music on my albums was] just these plastic waves of stuff, and it was really difficult to imagine any need to like, thrash the audience with strobes all the time. And now it's just all I want to do.

So the vibe will be markedly different at the live show this time around.

Yeah. And I'm singing. So, like, I'm singing and [Nate's] playing guitar, so there's all this potential for wipeout — wipeout potential — which is awesome and exciting, but also it hypes me up because I'm so, so starved to communicate some of the ideas from the record to like look at people and say the words that are on the record. I just know that they're gonna get familiar with the record and get excited to hear certain things, and it just feels like a real concert and less of like a weird Powerpoint presentation. I'm kind of over that.

In your "interview" with Ezra, you said you wanted Garden of Delete to be an album teens at the mall would be into. Do you expect to see, or want to see, a changing demographic in you fan base?

I don't know. I want to. I'm curious about it, because I think these songs are just kind of good songs are hopefully they get stuck in your head in a good way, and they're also somewhat antagonistic; you might put it on to get a rise out of your parents or whatever. Like, somehow, I like the idea at age 33 that maybe there's still some kind of music you can put on that really sets you apart from everybody. That's like an archaic thing, I feel like people don't even think that way anymore, but that's useful. It's more useful today than maybe ever before.

Garden of Delete is out Friday, November 13th on Warp.