Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven

By JUICE Malaysia • 07 Mar 2014 in Review

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Text Christopher Ujine Ong

EMOTIVE COMPUTER MUSIC
Advisory: R Plus Seven is rated RA, ‘R’ for being a rrreally, rrreally tough listen and ‘A’ for artistry and experimentalism. Oneohtrix Point Never (or less cryptically, Daniel Lopatin), for his latest full length, click-jumped (again) from his earlier samples-heavy Replica, to a new page of his own reconfiguration. And it does work like some kind of hyperlink – what primarily is preserved from his past works, is Lopatin’s creative effort to re-sequence digital music with its tiles of loops, sampled bits and bytes, into new expressive mosaics.

R Plus Seven is his masterpiece keystroke, in excavating familiar sounds, as they are processed through old personal computer software and MIDI effects, and packing these minute sounds into 10 sonic compositions. ‘Boring Angel’ grids over the low emanations of a church organ with hyper-kinetic Tron-synths before ascending with a chorus, ‘Americans’ merges chintzy rainforest sounds with stuttering glitches and a draft of drone muzack, and the other tracks being all coded puzzles of sounds on their own; connective fragments of Lopatin’s whole vision. This is truly computer music made emotive and thought provoking.

LISTEN TO: ‘Boring Angel’
IF YOU LIKE THIS YOU’LL DIG: Chuck Person
RATING: 4