By Bryan Baste | Staff Writer
Music can be used as a means to transport yourself to a different state of mind.
Think about whenever you listen to a psychedelic album, song, trance music, techno, etc. Any type of music that can take you out of reality and into your mind.
You probably felt some sort of “high” or altered state of consciousness for a brief moment while listening to that music.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s (OPN) new album, Tranquilizer, is a record that not only does that, but also achieves this in such a unique and fresh way. By OPN a.k.a. Daniel Lopatin, making the whole album mainly using old 90s-2000s royalty-free sample CDs found on Internet Archive.
The album reminds me a lot of Boards of Canada and Portishead, with their “hauntology” kind of production style, including looping, glitching, random cuts with random bursts of sound, and even songs just completely becoming distorted.
Using these unique samples and interesting sound collaging, sampling, looping, etc., he has created a record that feels like it is from another time, another place, something that feels haunted.
Tracks such as Modern Lust and Fear of Symmetry show one of my favorite aspects of the record, which is the dynamics involving the samples used with most of the tracklist.
Modern Lust starts with a looping sample of what can only be described as chimes of a sort, which loops most of the song as samples of viola, synths, trumpet, and more grow and swell towards the end of the track.
Right at the end of the track, everything peaks and melts into a low and twangy bassline as glitched-out synths and noises ramp up and slow down towards the end of the track.
Fear of Symmetry follows a similar formula, with loops of piano starting the song and continuing for most of it. However, the songs begin glitching out as samples fade in and out of the mix, and the whole track never settles into a calm rhythm, introducing drums towards the middle of the track.
The track swells, subsides, and then swells again in a glitched-out symphony of synth and sound.
Tranquilizer takes lost and bygone sounds and rebuilds them to create a vague, yet, in all, surreal experience. I highly recommend.
About Post Author
