Zones Without People

When Rifts came out more than 10 years ago, its rich abstraction, composed mostly on one or two 1980s analogue synths—primarily the Roland Juno-60, with its curiously limited technical options and controls that left room for intuition—at once invited and refused reference. (Listening to ‘Terminator Lake’ or ‘Format & Journey North’ in my student bedroom in Coventry, I didn’t know the New Age cassettes it was drawing on, or barely even much of the noise scene that gestated it, let alone the rich midden of junky sci-fi reading and teen capital-C cinephilia out of which it grew.) In an interview with Derek Walmsley discussing Rifts a few months before the release of R Plus 7, Dan Lopatin discussed how he “grew up in a family with one real musician and one so-called not-real musician, my dad. I approach music psychologically a lot of the time as a fan. My way was always to look more conceptually and in an abstract way and see if I could take these plastic or static ideas about genre and see how I could make new work with them.” Concepts filtered through the music’s spaces like spectres, visible one second and from one angle, then gone: thus the records that became Rifts appeared as “basically this Stanislaw Lem-style trilogy of stories about vague metaphysical sci-fi”, an idea trailed through the uncanny landscapes of Robert Beatty’s artworks and sonic echoes of Eduard Artemyev’s soundtracks for Andrei Tarkovsky. When, on 2011’s Replica, the references that had been in the background came to the foreground—the asymmetrical sample loops of 90s hiphop, forgotten TV commercials, 80s synth-pop’s tricksy sequencer labyrinths—it was almost a disappointment. The state that David Keenan described as “hypnagogic” was one in which a society of increasing inequality, saturated for 20 years by history’s end, could catch fragments of what had once been dreaming—history’s substitutes in consumer culture returning blurred in outline and with broken or disturbed details, Nietzsche’s Last Man learning again how to forget the nightmarish detritus filling his being. The smearing, the shaken or amateurish gestures, were all-important. Too hi-fi—as on Games’ That We Can Play, Washed Out or Ducktails—and it’s just Duran Duran or Jan Hammer back in the flesh. Too low-fi—as in the hundreds of bedroom synth projects that followed the lead of Lopatin, Emeralds or Dolphins Into The Future—and the concepts are undifferentiated from all the other noise.

This year’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never has been described as a look back over Lopatin’s catalogue, from his current position, at the other end of the DIY spectrum, as court producer to the more adventurous popstars, score composer for $50 million movies and bankable Warp mainstay. There’s certainly something of that: tropes from every stratum of his work return, all the way back to the New Age curlicues audible in ‘Bow Ecco’ and ‘Wave Idea’. That’s part of what made it his most satisfying album since 2013’s R Plus 7, a work that remains a crux of not just his own catalogue but post-internet art as a potentially self-reflective and critical manifestation of the airless horror of decentralised consumer culture that makes it possible. Lopatin embeds samples of station format changes, moments when one particular dream of music—“Somehow the music we grew up listening to doesn’t relate to our adult reality and our new dreams”—dies and is memorialised and a new one enshrined, containing in one time the dead past and the painfully present, what he calls in that Wire interview an “orthoganol time”. But then even 2018’s Age Of represented a culmination of several strands of his work, with the revenant MIDI and VST sounds of R Plus 7 shattered and recomposed, alongside a variety of other remembered moments, in the paralysing structures of its digital Baroque, which often sounded like the Muzak of a particularly banal version of William Gibson’s Villa Straylight. The conceptual framework of Age Of, a “song cycle” distributing its mostly wordless narrative across poker-faced artwork and a highly choreographed, lavish touring show, came to overwhelm the music itself. The result was a work whose only moments of abstraction or “illusionistic” strength, as Lopatin has described it, are in the fractal spread and overtooled sonic whorls of its references and micro-generic borrowings. Magic… improves on this partly by readmitting the teenage jam energy of Rifts and Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol 1, being willing to swallow reference in the swift fun of construction and transformation (except on the drag of ‘No Nightmares’, overcommitted to its digital power ballad conceit). But it also works because it grasps the ambivalence of the backward glance embedded in the OPN material it revisits and retools. The last 10 years of social media monopoly and omnipresent archive culture have given such retrospect and reference a different and darker valence.

There’s a light, exploratory touch particularly evident on the best tracks. ‘The Whether Channel’ fractures between lovely sketches of hypothetical library music, queasy drones, bubbling trash-voices and glittering, bored trap, never taking any part too seriously. ‘Tales From The Trash Stratum’ bubbles through multiple, often barely identifiable sources—bursts of dial-up voice, marimba loops, rippling strings, arcs of synthetic colour—with a remarkable ease and a loose, surprising sense of design, just on the edge of cohering. Where on Age Of a theoretically pop track like ‘Black Snow’ would become a showcase of high-end effects, micro-panning vocals, meticulously atonal melodies and dull, over-tooled bass blips, on Magic the ballads of ‘Long Road Home’, ‘I Don’t Love Me Anymore’ and particularly ‘Lost But Never Alone’ work in service of their songwriting. ‘Lost…’ and its Safdie Brothers-directed video turn the feeling, new to the age of Internet 2.0, of being permanently afloat in a plenitude of information that’s nonetheless selected, canalised and directed to you without your choice into a slow, febrile and weightless song. The flickers of effects that accompany key changes and particularly the transition to the Wild Stallyns bridge feel like the video’s multiple layers of anachronism, moving through the translucent barrier of screens: the screen of the iPhone the Cosby Show black punk character glances at, the fragments of Halloween II and local news cut by the edit, studio monitors providing a glimpse of the present that flows into the anachronic media past, in an ouroboros. Reference, in its intoxicating power, is contained in a playful structure it splinters, softens, distorts. If R Plus 7 was the vanitas of post-internet music, the grinning and lavishly rendered skull recalling contemporary digital culture’s inner impulse towards the frozen value of the commodity, Magic is the luxury items to which it’s the foil: everything death will buy us, now that we spend every day dreaming.