Bonafide Magazine @ MSN: Review: Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven |  |
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Posted: 27 Oct 2013 11:16 AM PDT
The music of Oneohtrix Point Never – the moniker of Daniel Lopatin – will come as a bit of a shock to the first-time listener. That is not to say that the music is abrasive or confrontational, in effect it is quite the reverse. The synthesiser lines and stuttered samples have a soporific quality, and yet there is something about it that prompts a mixture of confusion and confrontation. However, for those prepared to give R Plus Seven a chance this will rapidly become part of the appeal. There are very few people that could claim to be contemporaries in regard to Lopatin's style. James Ferraro, of the now defunct Skaters, could perhaps come close; his 2011 album Far Side Virtual seems a definite touch-stone for R Plus Seven, with its counterbalancing of high-gloss synth pre-sets against a fuzzy audio fidelity.
Everything has the sense of listening to a degraded VHS tape, fragments of a soundtrack to an instructional video for a pharmaceuticals warehouse. This may sound dreadful to the over-wary, but I can assure you that the results are utterly compelling.One of the key resources in securing the success of R Plus Seven lies in its use of the uncanny. The sonic-palette is jarringly familiar to anyone who has found themselves killing time in a retail park in the last two decades (oddly timeless structures at the best of times, a simulacrum of the future given a firm grubbing over). On Inside World a breathy synth choir idly explores a scale before the track gives itself over momentarily to a series of detached instances; it could be channel-surfing through a series of late night shopping channels, but it neatly indicates that Oneohtrix Point Never grounds his aesthetic in a fierce revisiting of the kitsch of eighties electronic muzak. This creates an odd nostalgic contrast, at the time these sounds were intended to suggest a sense of modernity that now seems totally unrealisable, perhaps even naively utopian. The high-concept gloss is rendered fatally askew by the collapse of the economic assumptions that supported it. The prolific use of stuttering, looped samples on R Plus Seven suggests algorithms locked into patterns of transactional error, trying to force a way forward through brute determination. For all its mournful qualities, R Plus Seven does not solely confront the listener with a dose of cynical alienations. Or rather it does, but in doing so also manages to suggest a kind of emotional pathos that remains elusive. The album offers a brace of songs round its mid-point, Zebra and Along, that indicate a faint optimism. The harmonising sax and synth riff that acts as a coda to Zebra offers a sublime moment of coherence, not a cheap trick but a genuinely emotive few seconds after the track's earlier rush. Meanwhile, Along offers up an ambient stretch before the return of a jarringly high-concept synthetic pipe. It's a faintly reconciliatory move between Oneohtrix Point Never's source material and compositional instinct, one that indicates the tension that both makes R Plus Seven such a challenge, and such a rewarding album to engage with. Words: Andrew Spragg  |
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Posted: 27 Oct 2013 10:37 AM PDT
Far from being a newbie to the scene, British producer and DJ Om Unit has been around a good while in various guises. In the 2000s he was known in hip-hop circles as 2tall, working with the likes of Jehst, Foreign Beggars, Dudley Perkins and Georgia Anne Muldrow (the latter two on album Beautiful Mindz) as producer, but with his eyes (and hands) firmly in the turntablist world too, counting DMC finalist as one of his many achievements. Around 2008 he adopted the Om Unit moniker, pushing towards a more 'electronic' production sound, something he'd already journeyed towards as 2tall. The past few years have seen him spearhead the independent spirit of underground beats, producing music that refuses to be tangled up in genre labelling despite a variety of tags being thrown at it. He kicked off his own label, Cosmic Bridge, in 2011 – releases from the likes of Moresounds and Danny Scrilla have blazed an instantly recognizable trail of releases.
Recently Om Unit fulfilled a long term goal in releasing three pounding tracks on Metalheadz. When it comes to listening to Threads, his first album for Civil Music, you don't need to know any of this – but if you do, it adds extra weight to what is one of the most powerful releases of 2013.Proceedings kick off with an immediacy and ferocity typical of Cosmic Bridge (Folding Shadows retains Om Unit's love for pounding, plodding atmosphere-setting), so when the melancholic chords of second track The Silence build up to the gorgeous vocals of Jinadu, it's a bit of a revelation – a little like going offworld for the first time (I'd imagine). It's here where the album opens up and you realize all the genre-defining is irrelevant. There's an inherent narrative here, an invitation to jump aboard the good starship Om and join the journey. Jus Sayin floats on a similar vibe, with Gone The Hero (of Jneiro Jarel's Label Who) elucidating on life and music. The bulk of Threads treads a slightly different path to those sweeter tracks – much more beat driven although still dominated by background synth, which isn't to say these tracks are too similar in any way. The Metalheadz legacy is more prevalent in terms of mood (Reverse Logic, Nagual), but the hip-hop swagger certainly rears its head too (perhaps most obviously under some robot chords in Wall of Light). The last few tracks especially might be the most difficult to stomach for those of a non-'dance music' learning, with clear junglisitc tendencies, but there's a depth and direction in there that rewards repeat listens. There's a clear move towards avoiding repetition and monotony too, with several switch ups over the course of the album. Charlie Dark concludes with full on poetry on an almost beatless backdrop, allowing us to disengage carefully, a stark contrast to the album intro. Om Unit's sound is an ocean of influences whose end product is never less than powerful. The om, traditionally, resonates with the universe. Although that may be a little grandiose for an album, Threads will certainly tick the right boxes with many and contains much to hypnotise. Words: James Ernesto Lang  |
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