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Daniel Lopatin has been recording as Oneohtrix Point Never since 2007. His career started out in ambience and drone, and as such he seems to be a world away from where he began on Garden of Delete, his latest LP. Listening to the record is like being swept up into an digital maelstrom. It’s an aggressive, abrasive, and unrelenting record that offers little in the way of room for the listener to breathe, and the whole album sounds like a computer in an extended meltdown, desperately spewing out clips of melodies and glitchy snatches of metallic noise. The title of the album is a reference to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and this triptych is in itself a good visual depiction of the chaotic and hellish landscape that Lopatin has now unleashed. It’s almost impossible to pigeonhole the album in terms of genre – at times its brutality makes it sound like metal, while at other times it seems to be some perverse form of EDM.
Attempting to dissect any track on the album poses an arduous task – there are simply too many elements to each to prise apart. Ezra, for example, one of the finest tracks on the record, starts off with a moody, stop-start rhythm, before meandering through what feel like the barest bones of a number of other pieces of music, compiled together into one new and slightly horrific creation. It doesn’t make for easy listening, but Lopatin’s collage-like method of assembling music is certainly intriguing, and the listener that sticks with the track is carried through to a moment of real beauty towards its end. The album doesn’t want for these moments of beauty, but they are always brief and fleeting. The fact that such a disjointed album could ever remain listenable is testament to Lopatin’s musical ability, and the record is more than just listenable, it’s arresting. Other highlights on the album include Sticky Drama, with its sickly sweet but indecipherable vocals, and its incorporation of influences from industrial and grindcore, and Animals, which the artist described as an attempt to create a “medieval cyberballad”.
One of the most interesting aspects of the album is the totality of its experience, which goes far beyond the music itself. To even attempt to fully understand the narrative of the LP, one has to follow through the numerous online rabbit-holes that Lopatin has created in support of the record. One example of his creations is the eternally pubescent, acne-ridden, alien Ezra, who on his blog (backdated to 1994) features an interview with Lopatin himself about the album. Then there’s Kaoss Edge, the fictional nineties “hypergrunge” band that Lopatin created a website for; even going so far as to record music for the band which he in turn then self-referentially cited as an influence for Garden of Delete. There’s a definite tone of teenage angst that pervades throughout the album, something that’s mirrored in the (largely depressing) narrative of Ezra, as presented online. It’s a wonderful symbiosis of creative media on the part of the artist that genuinely adds a deeper resonance to the album. However, while the themes at times might seem lofty and carefully wrought, sometimes they are wonderfully mundane – I Bite Through It is, in the artist’s own words, meant to capture “the physicality of biting through something”.
It’s very much an album for our age: we spend countless hours scrolling past junk on the internet, enduring Youtube ads and trying to navigate our way around pop-ups. What Lopatin has done, instead of going around the digital detritus as one would usually do, is to have turned and embraced it and even celebrated it. It’s an album of forgotten internet rubbish, manically hewn together into one of the best electronic releases of the year.
