bol4 Голосов: 1 Адрес блога: http://muzic-s.blogspot.com/ Добавлен: 2013-02-09 20:33:49 блограйдером 1234zz

Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts

"e;Timbral fascism sucks,"e; said Daniel Lopatin in a 2009 interview with The Wire. His point was it's wrong to reject specific sounds-- in this case, the synth tones used in 1980s new age-- simply out of disdain for the genre they're associated with. In one sense, Lopatin's solo project Oneohtrix Point Never is an ongoing battle against timbral fascism. He's tried to liberate synth sounds from their conventional trappings, placing them in less familiar contexts and coaxing you to hear them in new ways.

This laid-back battle began with Lopatin's first album, 2007's Betrayed in the Octagon, which he called "e;a stoned space epic about one really bad day in the life of an astronaut."e; His astronaut landed on a strange planet in 2009's Russian Mind and wrote the score to his own death in 2009's Zones Without People. But more interesting than that inscrutable tale was the way that, throughout this trilogy, Lopatin re-imagined synth music for the current era, injecting tension into something normally soft and cheesy. New age got a bad rep because it became too light to resonate, simplifying emotion instead of creating it. But even Lopatin's most beatific arpeggios and most soothing drones avoid sentimentality and easy-listening ambience. 

That became clearer when New York noise label No Fun packaged those first three albums together-- along with tracks from smaller-run releases-- into the 2009 double CD Rifts. Listen to one track here or there and it can be tough to hear how lighter moments differ from the saccharine cloud of incidental mood music. But immerse yourself for long stretches, and Rifts sounds more like the hypnotic marathons of Terry Riley than something playing in a store that sells candles and crystals. In that sense, the set was greater than the sum of its original albums. Absorbing all two and a half hours revealed commonalities between Lopatin's disparate constructions-- the kind that aren't apparent when you take OPN in small doses.

The immersion opportunities are even greater on Lopatin's new version of Rifts, issued on his own label Software. This lavish 5xLP/ 3xCD set includes six more tracks from previous releases, stretching it past the three-hour mark. Revisiting Rifts in this expanded (and reordered) form, I've found its stoic sadness even more impressive. Lopatin finds poignancy in wavering tones and rippling notes, conveying a sense of loss mixed with stiff-lipped acceptance. Even the set's one curveball-- an acoustic guitar song called "e;I Know It's Taking Pictures From Another Plane (Inside Your Sun)"e;-- carries this tone, and sounds logical squeezed in between synth-scapes.

The rich moods of Rifts persist in the tracks Lopatin adds to this version. Take the hymn-like despondency in the trebly voices of "e;Memory Vague."e; Or the slow lurch of "e;The Trouble With Being Born"e;, which sounds like a defeated army returning home, dejected enough to hang their heads but prideful enough to march in step. Such complex sentiments have marked Lopatin's work even as he's moved to the noisier drones of 2010's Returnal and the glitchier loops of 2011's Replica.

So in retrospect, the path OPN has traveled makes sense. But when I first got Betrayed in the Octagon from No Fun in 2007, it was a bit of a shock. At that point the noise underground was still in an upswing, and the harsher sounds of Carlos Giffoni's label (and festival) led the charge. There was diversity inside the No Fun umbrella, but nothing there sounded like Betrayed in the Octagon. It turns out that Giffoni and Lopatin were prescient, or at least observant, because soon many other underground artists began mining new age styles.

That trend may be less in vogue a couple of years later, but it survives. Just in the past two months, excellent forays into new age-tinted synth have come from noise-leaning types such as Joseph Raglani, Robert Beatty, and M. Geddes Gengras. All of which makes Rifts look like an important touchstone, and it should. The way Lopatin discovered fresh ideas inside of a worn-out genre is an inspiring story for the present age.