R Plus Seven was his best one. I think it's musically satisfying - definitely more so than it's interesting to talk about. The schizo-aesthetic crystalline digital majestic artificiality bla bla bla get's boring quickly.
The melodies are very fresh and the internet hyper fragmented sound is actually done well.
I liked the stuff he was saying around that time about vertically and horiztonally dense music and treating music like an object in space,
Crass things, sticking the knife in and the letter R: Angus Finlayson chats with the US artist on the occasion of his new album for Warp.
www.residentadvisor.net
R Plus Seven sounds very rigorously composed—more so than your early work, which felt quite improvisatory. Did you take a very different approach with this record?
I've made vertically dense music in the past, and I more or less decided to do a record where I would flip that axis over this way [horizontally] and just excavate. So now I have a plane—a horizontal plane with very particular musical objects, in almost like a tableaux format. The objects themselves are very simple, but what they are doing, for me anyway, has an opportunity to be very complex. Also, that created more interesting opportunities for rhythm and micro-placement of things, and working with MIDI a lot.
It’s been yet another busy year for Daniel Lopatin. Last week saw the release of R Plus Seven, his latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never and his debut for Warp Records. He describes the record as “ornamental”, and it buzzes with unexpected, even humorous moments and flashes of light. More than...
thequietus.com
There’s a teasing quality to the album as well.
Yeah, in a way. Like if there’s a sculpture in a space, you can walk around it and certain perspectives will only allow you to experience so much of it. But there could be shadows or light or dealing with a particular obfuscated bit of a sculpture from one angle you want to explore from the other side. The things I find interesting about experiencing an object in space, I wanted to feel compositionally.
Obscuring certain things deliberately, or hiding them...
Or showing them in different perspectives. Simple, gestural things about acute moments that make them feel like an object instead of a musical convention.
