Oneohtrix Point Never: "Nassau"

Daniel Lopatin’s career has oft been colored by a disconnect with humankind. Zones Without People (2009)—indicative of this by its name alone—is a wordless synth-laden epic that follows cyborgs slowly growing into autonomous, self-aware creatures in a masterless world. The title track of Returnal (2010) features Lopatin’s voice submerged in enough effects to make him unrecognizable, both as himself and as a human being. And his collaboration with Joel Ford this year, Channel Pressure, casts the two as a computer consciousness attempting to make contact with a tech-nerd teenager. “Can you hear me through the TV?”, he begs, “even though you hear me…I’m so far away, so far away.” Dude’s clearly not much of a people person.

On “Nassau,” his latest track as Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin uses a looped vocal sample as the mortar to his song, the monotonous “smu-” coalescing alongside a deciduous collection of jumpy beats, popping bubbles, and barking dogs. In doing so he peels away the veneer of its personhood, engaging his listening audience in a bit of cognitive dissociation courtesy of the clip in question: as it is repeated ad nauseam it loses all meaning and humanness, till the word becomes nothing more than a guttural noise. Eventually developing into something more animal than anthropological, more National Geographic than literary, the “smu-” in question becomes a part of the beat loop as foreign and cold as the skittering drum track accompanying it.

As the track goes on and the vocal sample stays on repeat, a glittering piano piece slides into the mix and gives the looped clip the foil it was missing from the outset. Opening as a test of its listeners’ patience, its annoyance grazing the tipping point, the clip seems to find its niche amongst the rest of the extra-human elements, its placement being so well navigated that it is eventually unnoticeable, even as Lopatin starts to twist and manipulate it as the song comes to a close. And the transposition makes sense: assuming Lopatin is the vocalist in the clip, when he is recognized as a human he feels out of place, awkward. But looked upon as an instrument, he feels right at home.