Tone Glow 195: Oneohtrix Point Never

An interview with Daniel Lopatin about including the ugly and banal in his music, being inspired by film and sculpture, and his new album 'Tranquilizer' (2025)

Oneohtrix Point Never

Photo by Aidan Zamiri

Oneohtrix Point Never is the artist name for Daniel Lopatin (b. 1982), an American composer, producer, and songwriter who has spent three decades making electronic music. During the early stages of his career, Lopatin made synth-based ambient and drone pieces that were in line with other acts he was touring with, including Emeralds. His ideas began to crystallize at the turn of the 2010s, notably with Returnal (2010), his vaporwave project Chuck Person and the release of Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), and his plunderphonics LP Replica (2011).

In the years since, Lopatin has remained restless in his sonic curiosity. His first album for Warp, R Plus Seven (2013), saw him heavily utilizing MIDI instruments and presets as conduits for thinking about object-oriented ontology, while Garden of Delete (2015) saw him folding nu metal and grunge influences into his complex synth tapestries. Age Of (2018) would contain songs featuring his and others’ voices, while Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (2021) and Again (2023) served as summations of his career, with the latter being described as “a speculative autobiography.” Lopatin has also made soundtracks for multiple films, especially those by the Safdie brothers, including Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and Marty Supreme (2025).

Lopatin’s newest studio album is Tranquilizer, and it pulls a lot of its material from an archive of once-lost sample CDs maintained by the Internet Archive. The album is out physically on November 17th and digitally on November 21st. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Lopatin on October 17th to discuss a memorable trip to the dentist, the importance of the ugly and banal, and Abner Hershberger, the artist behind Tranquilizer’s cover art.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was intrigued by the press release for your new album, Tranquilizer (2025). You talk about a dental visit where you’re “lying beneath a fluorescent panel of blue skies and palm trees.” What’s your relationship to the dentist and your teeth in general? I ask because my father is a dentist, and growing up I advised him to put landscape paintings on the ceiling so people could relax, and he actually did it. My teeth are really bad, so I’ve had a lot of procedures done over the years, and I eventually found dental visits to be so cozy; sometimes I end up falling asleep.

Oneohtrix Point Never: I grew up before they were trying to make the dentist comfortable, and I have this really formative memory of them removing my teeth. They removed my canines for some reason, it was really weird—and I was just a kid! I really value this memory because I distinctly recall hearing the music playing at the dentist. It was a proto-“this is an unpleasant place to be, no one likes it here, so we’re gonna put on soft rock” situation. But the unavoidable, grizzly truth of your skull cavity vibrating as your teeth are cleaned—or worse, extracted—always enters the fray.

I always valued that experience and I’ve really just been telling that story in my music, over and over. It happens in different ways, but it keeps on coming back. I’ve always mythologized that dental visit as the provenance of an idea: I always need to include these elements together, as a way to provide insight into human nature. If there were a Ten Commandments of OPN, one would be “Thou Shalt Not Exclude the Ugly and Banal.”

It’s so funny that you suggested that to your father. I showed my 70-something analyst this picture, which we used to later hand draw and animate for the album teaser, and he said, “Oh, are you on 42nd? Do you go to this doctor?” I was like, oh, this is a thing. My engineer’s friend from Columbus, Ohio—where he grew up—is a photographer and I was looking through his photographs one day. He had taken a picture at a Thai restaurant and there were drop ceiling tiles that had a poster of clouds. This was an otherwise anesthetized space, or at least the ceiling was. And drop ceiling tiles always remind me of corporate environments; when you see them, you’re somewhere where work happens. In the case of the dentist, you’re where this painful procedure happens.

There are all these ways we try to lessen the blow or introduce an escape hatch. This occurred to me at the dentist when I was looking up at that image. I was looking at the palm trees and I could see these tiny slits in the drop tiles—they looked like dim stars, like a galaxy. Who’s to say that the palm trees are any more special than the drop tiles? And then the album happened—it was right from there. I started connecting it to other things that were interesting to me, specifically about commercial music or construction kit music.

What’s the timeline for all these things, then? I know that the album was also a result of you stumbling upon an archive of ’90s sample CDs on the Internet Archive that vanished.

It’s all jumbled in my mind, but many years ago, I bookmarked a page on the Internet Archive that had this huge swathe of sample CDs. It was an amateur archive, like “everything I got, hear it is.” Tons of stuff. I bookmarked it three or four years ago, probably during COVID, and I really wanted to do something with it but I didn’t know what. So I bookmarked it, forgot about it, and then I went back years later—it’s gone. There’s some DMCA situation and I thought, I guess that’s over. I make Again (2023) and I find that it resurfaces. It occurred to me that even that—the disappearing and resurfacing—was something I wanted to capture. I wanted to capture the emotional register of an era where everything is archived but perpetually slipping away.

But it’s not this lost Atlantis. We rely on these institutions and we egoically think everything is gonna keep going, that there’s some sort of continuity and preservation with all of these things, but they just flicker away. And maybe they come back later. That entire life—of something glowing and coming to life, of receding and coming back—is just so beautiful. This isn’t some sort of myth about a lost past, it’s this idea that you can’t separate these samples from their history and purpose in society and from their enclosure or armature, which is the archive. And they’re connected. As people lose interest and things resurface, people on YouTube might be like, “Make drum ‘n’ bass with this stuff!” All of this is emotionally overwhelming to me. I wanted to make something that might give it a chance to live some other way, though on my terms and as an art project.

Things are always changing as a result of time and with whoever is interfacing with the material. We all have our own contexts and are understanding art through our own experiences. You talked about including the banal and ugly, but how do you approach that when anything that is “banal” and “ugly” can easily be rendered exciting and pretty? How do you ensure things stay banal and ugly?

That was one of the most amazing things about this archive. It was overwhelmingly filled with useful but dull samples. To your point, one of the things that helped in this moment was to allow these things to be random, to not curate them. I was always looking for a good sample library software, but all of them these days are marketed like, “Look at all of your samples in a cloud and visualize them in all these different ways!” Everything is really good—too good.

I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing whoever made this program, because I love them, but it really doesn’t have the market share and it’s not competing with these big software companies. It’s called Sononym, and even that word makes me want to cry. It’s so rote and rudimentary—it has your waveforms at the top that you can scrub through like a sampler, and you can make two little loop points and just hear a slice of it down to a grain. It’s just clicking on your waveform with your mouse and hearing things. It occurred to me that I could dump this huge thing into one area and record back into Ableton, Sononym as an external source, and just use my mouse to play. I wanted a horrible, drab thing where you’re just clicking around—it’s like you’re playing slots at the casino. These magical moments would occur, of the sounds being in concert with other sounds by accident. To me, it’s the most process-oriented OPN record in a really long time, since Replica (2011). It was like, let’s just run this process and, in the amalgam, we made sure that a lot of ugly things were poking out and getting into the mix.

Something you said nails what I dislike about a lot of contemporary music. Everyone is too aware of what sounds good, of “the right thing to do.” There are fewer chances for people to do something accidentally wrong. Given that you’ve been making music for decades, how are you unlearning things as you’ve gained more skill? How do you maintain this sort of ugliness and naivety?

Music that involves sound-on-sound layers, chance operations, or maybe if we’re just talking about electronic music in general where you’re able to collage things at a high level, it involves taste. And who knows where that comes from and whether you have it or not (laughter). You hope that your perspective can guide you, but you don’t really know. I’ve made things that I thought were really interesting and insightful, but people were like, “Oh, that’s so cringe.” And I’ve made things that I thought were funny and people were like, just stop. You never really know. I rely on intuition and my belief in taste, and then I let the chips fall where they may. It’s hard, and there’s a level of embarrassment in all of that, like, “What the fuck are we doing?” But I can only really try to be honest with these things, so I constantly push myself to be true.

I can’t totally work from my gut, but I also can’t work purely conceptually either. As I’m going, one thing takes over—my gut takes over—and this sound reminds me of something idiomatically or of a trope or whatever. Texture takes over and the sonority of something is needed. I have to stay true to this idea that if I’m very present and I’m listening very deeply, then maybe the music won’t be that bad (laughter). If I’m honest, it’s a constant check-in with myself. Like, are we doing this because we really want to?

I appreciate whenever people have these extreme reactions to art though, or when there’s a complete disconnect between intention and reception.

For better or worse, there’s always this curiosity about my music and what it means. I find it interesting, of course. If I have something to say, and it involves lyrics, I’m gonna find a way to sing it even if it’s with some tool or with my limited vocal range. I always thought that Oneohtrix Point Never was an experiment, not so much an experiment in music as an experiment in expressing myself—there’s an element of cringe in this whole thing (laughter). So of course I find it interesting what resounds and what doesn’t. With time and experience, I have picked up on the fact that whatever I think will be interesting or cool or fascinating is not that, and the thing I barely clocked as being anything at all will be what others really feel.

When you’re young in general, especially as an artist, you’re engineering reactions. You think you’re just so fucking great. And then you’re like, wait, I don’t control anything. And then you start making better work. I think that’s been the lesson I’ve learned. During Again, we were doing these podcast episodes of NTS called Cool Protrusions. It was me and my engineer Nathan [Salon], who’s a huge part of this record and really, really talented. He’s younger than me, and I don’t think I could fully wrap my head around RateYourMusic until he showed me. And it’s so funny, we’re looking at the real-time reactions to this stuff. It’s like The Addams Family and the father looking at the stock ticker, getting completely overwhelmed.

There’s something masochistic about it, to look at these responses and take them seriously, but I like to relate to fans and I know they have different opinions. Part of it is about having a conversation. I’ve always been interested in that because I am a fan; it’s not so different from Tarantino being a video store clerk who then made films. I’m always in the audience, and that’ll never go away. If it does, that means music will truly become some sort of job. I want to selfishly be there and engage with it.

You said earlier that you couldn’t make music that was purely conceptual. I’m sure part of that is related to your own personality, but it also feels related to your desire to connect with people. Purely conceptual music is going to be less resonant to fans because it’s less emotional, not to say that purely conceptual music can’t be emotional either.

I think it has something to do with what’s included and what’s excluded. I was talking to a friend about the record, and he’s known me for a long time, and he was like, “This is your Archive Fever (1995), your library degree album.” I was a philosophy geek for a really long time when I was younger, and at library school I read Derrida’s Archive Fever. I looked at it again and he’s talking about how the archive is also what is not being included—it’s almost Lacanian. Anytime I look at any highly restrictive school of artmaking, I always think about how it’s telling me more about what’s not in there than what is. The fact that you really don’t want the other stuff in the music makes it really interesting. There’s great conceptual artwork that’s really mind-bending, and they can have emotional resonance to the audience, so it’s never truly divorced, but to me, the process always reveals something about unconscious desires. It’s this beautiful interplay between the private unconscious and the public, and they’re always engaging with each other. I let all of this stuff ping pong around.

What’s not included in Tranquilizer, then? What samples did you avoid? I’ve listened to the album a few times already and I’m intrigued by the dubby ambience on the title track and “Vestigel,” as well as the reggae skanks on “Lifeworld”—

And “Cherry Blue”!

Right, so you have these elements you’re including. What’s getting excluded?

It’s such a good question. There were a lot of things used. There were the sample CDs, as well as these ROMplers with pre-fab beats and songs on them—basically combi patches. Nathan or I called the record “combi hauntology,” and there’s this gratuitous ugliness to all of it. We’re not trying to filter everybody and have them listen to wallpaper; a lot of it was about finding and respecting the excellence of this muzak. Like, this has soul, it has a spirit to it that is excellent, and let’s amplify it. A lot of the stuff that wasn’t included was stuff that was just dorky. It was just a simple process of trying to entertain yourself, of making something that had reverence for the magic already in the source material. The stuff that was really dead inside felt almost like armature; it wasn’t always the thing I wanted in the center, and that’s when it becomes a conceptual record as opposed to a feel-based record. The concept could be, “Only deal with the most brutal and construct kit aspects of this stuff.” I would love to hear that record, but I don’t know if I would ever rinse that, and I’m not trying to make a record I wouldn’t want to hear over and over again, let alone inflict that on other people.

For so long, I’ve always felt like your songs really get the listener invested in a specific loop, and then you’ll pull the rug under us and move into a different passage.

Like in a bad way?

It forces me as a listener to understand your role as a sort of tour guide, moving us from one spectacle to the next.

Oh, totally. I really love the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. It’s one surprise after another, and it’s not too much, and there’s something you can return to each time. And the more times you go on the ride, you start picking up on the artisanal details, but also other details, too. You see its arrangement and structure. What’s an exciting proposal for instrumental music is, can you make something that intoxicates you musically but would also guarantee that you return to it and have a different relationship to it over time? As you interact with it, the things that remain the same are there, but as you yourself have passed through time, the music remains as a “control” to your own “variable.” There’s enough diversity and chaos and surprise that it yields repeat listening. Why? Because those are my favorite pieces to listen to, or even film and sculpture, where it’s expected to traverse the object a few times. With film, once you get the idea and the feeling of what it’s doing, you can get into the particularities of the story or whatever.

What films and sculptures made you recognize that you could approach music in this way?

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I saw it when I was a kid and then as a teenager and now in my mid-life. It was always just a complete, visceral experience as a kid, and as a teenager it was about the headiest things related to evolution and technology and humankind, but as a middle-aged person, it’s about a man and his family. I watched it last year sometime and I was so fixated on A) the two guys sharing sandwiches while they’re on their way to the planet, B) the conversations back home with the daughter, and C) the idea that these human beings are so far away from their family and will never get to have any kind of relationship with them ever again. And you have HAL, who basically wants a family. It never occurred to me that the movie was about that, and this was after years of claiming it was my favorite movie.

With sculpture it’s hard because there are things I like that I can’t even see. My favorite sculpture is Stone of Spiritual Understanding (1962) by Isamu Noguchi. It’s part of MoMA but I don’t even know if I’ve ever seen it. I go to the Noguchi Museum to see things like it, and a lot of his work strikes me as being this deep feedback loop. It’s very contemplative and refractive. There’s times where it’s just about the formal constraints of the object, whether the surface is smooth or striated. Sometimes it’s just this talisman that’s there, asking you to reflect on your life. The fact that these things can be multi-use, multi-purpose is very commendable.

I like how you’re mentioning all this. When I think of 2001, the purely conceptual version of stuff in that film would be the works of Jordan Belson. Have you seen those?

I don’t think so.

I’ve heard them described as “100% special effects,” I’ll send you the films.

Wow, please do.

[Editor’s Note: After Lopatin saw some Belson films, he responded with the following: “Belson is blowing my mind! The soft gradients really work with the jacked-up, rhythmic editing style. Actually reminds me of a more cosmic Robert Beavers” and then shared a YouTube link to the latter’s 2000 masterpiece Sotiros.

He then shared the above video for “Lifeworld” and said, “I made the video using the Kino Library archives, and it is essentially like Beavers/Belson cosmic minimalism/romanticism that ties regular, everyday events to exploding stars and whatnot. I think editing being so muscular and percussive changes the index of images to the point that they’re inseparable.”]

You said Tranquilizer is your most process-oriented album since Replica and both are rooted in samples. What do you think is different between the Dan then and the Dan now in terms of how you’re approaching these two records?

I think Replica is a good record, but I’ve never truly understood the second half of it. I think I understand the first half really well, but the second half was something like… there’s one more in me, I don’t know how or when or what the material will be, but what I wanted from Replica was to feel like more of a total work. I think I made it hastily, at a time when I was more ADD and withdrawn. It’s a sadder record. By the second half, I flip that record, and I can hear the depression. And that’s a very personal thing—I don’t expect that to be the experience for other people. I always thought I could improve upon the formula and make it more of a total work, whatever that means to me. And that’s not to say I’m a complete person now or a happy person, but I feel like I’m more of a meticulous person—my arrangements are stronger, my sense of what the work is for me is clearer.

I think Tranquilizer is something I’m really excited about on that level. It’s surprising that people engaged with Replica in the way that they did at the time, but I always felt it could be better. And while Tranquilizer is my most process-oriented record since Replica, the end result is so different that I want it to be experienced in and of itself. It’s tempting to compare the two, but I hope people listen to it as an experience with its own merits—I truly feel like I’ve never done anything like it before, and I’m happy about that.

What does it mean for it to be “better”? The more meticulous structure?

It’s hard to say, but it’s a record from start to finish. Replica is this incredible thing of these blasts of music, and Tranquilizer you get that too, but you can sit down and experience it as a whole in a way that I wasn’t personally able to do with Replica. And I love making a record record, like a sort of Dark Side of the Moon (1973) situation. To me, Replica only works if I break things out and don’t listen to it from start to finish. And I’ve done this with other records, but I don’t think I fully achieved it with that one.

This is all similar to how you’re talking about the Jurassic Park ride. When did you first ride that, and when did you most recently ride it?

(laughter). I’ve only been to Universal Studios a few times. And when I rode it, I rode it multiple times—I was like, I gotta get back on this one. It was 2016 or 2017; it was a pretty long time ago. And I just rinsed that one ride because I was so obsessed with it.

What do you think you were able to notice with repeated visits?

The workers! I could see what was going on. The first time, you’re just entranced. And you know, the one that was more interesting to me on that level was the Harry Potter ride. It’s so fast and kinetic and in the dark, but if you go back a second or third time, you can see the machines and the undercarriage of the thing you’re sitting in, you can see other people, you can see a door, you can see a hard hat area in the corner—all this stuff. It mirrors a lot of what’s happening on the record in this way.

How important is it that you’re showing your hand in the music, as opposed to it just being this sonic world you can go inside?

I think it’s very important because we’re entering into a time when authorship is being deeply questioned and contested. There’s a lot of arrogance in Silicon Valley about how little we need art or individualism. There are a lot of arguments to be made about all the great gains that were made with 20th-century recorded music by removing authorship. So much of what I love about electronic music or techno is the removal of the author, the way it can become a communal experience.

And I don’t know if I can fully address this in one fell swoop, but the records I like to listen to are ones that have a lot of personality. That still matters to me. If I’m gonna try to be involved with making my own records, I’m gonna try to deliver on that promise, I’m gonna deliver something true, like, “This is how I see the moment, this is how I see my life.” Otherwise it’s the ennui of life without personality—it’s just this world without any distinction, without any perspective.

Can you talk about the decision behind the cover art, to use this piece by Abner Hershberger? It’s very different from any other OPN cover art. What was your thinking there?

I really liked the symmetry of the blades, as if to suggest distinct metronomic time. And then the chaos of what I think of as lime-green grass—or the tilling of the field—underneath it. He could’ve said, “These are my memories of growing up on a Mennonite farm in Indiana,” or he could’ve said, “This is my homage to everyone who made these goddamn samples,” because oh my god… you don’t understand until you scrape a website for 400 gigabytes of this crap that people actually made this. All of this was made by people with personalities who were given a directive to have less personality, or maybe they were trying to have their peacock feathers shown. It has all that variety and entropy and chaos. And here you go, it’s beautifully laid out in a folder that’s indexed, and put into categories, and you have to go till the field to find yourself in it. That to me is just so romantic, so definitive, and the image felt so great. It is a kind of shocking cover—it’s bright.

Do you consider yourself a romantic?

I am. When I visit my parents, we get to reflecting. I’ll ask, “What was I like as a kid?” They’ll say, “Oh, you would run up and kiss the mailman!” So when the mailman came around, I’d climb up his leg and give him a kiss on the cheek. I more or less love love, and I want to believe that a lot of what’s happening in my work is redemption. I care about music as a stand-in for my soul. If I can love music, if I can find something that’s interesting about it, if I can find something beautiful, then I’m still a human being. But that’s constantly being challenged now for everybody and it’s only going to get worse. Tranquilizer, to me, was about the double entendre: I’m gonna force you to chill (laughter). We have to be human, we have to dream, we have to wake up. We have to be romantic about this moment even though it’s grim—we have to be romantic with whatever we got.

Is there anything about the album that we didn’t mention that you wanted to talk about?

I didn’t intend to say what I just did, but that’s it. I was toying with calling it Tranquilizer… or How I Woke Up or Tranquilizer… How to Wake Up. There’s something about that. It’s both a chill-out record and a wake-up record. And that’s what I really dig about it.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. What’s one thing you love about yourself?

I’m really good at making breakfast sandwiches. I’m excellent at breakfast anything. I make scrambled eggs at restaurant quality—I cut the heat, it’s searing hot, I throw the eggs on there, they’re very well seasoned, I swirl them around, they ribbon beautifully. I’m very happy when I present it to my girlfriend or to whoever’s around. I’m really proud of my newfound abilities in the kitchen, and I’m hoping to improve on that over time.

What’s in the breakfast sandwich?

I have two variations. One is more of a tartine. I just grew up with it, but my mom told me, “I’m sorry, I was too busy to clock that I was doing something amazing to know it was tartine.” And I said, “Mom, let me tell you—it’s an open-face toast that you made with mayo and 6-minute soft-boiled eggs, so they’re a little jammy. And then there’s salt and pepper and cucumbers sliced very, very thinly and patted dry.” It’s basically egg salad with cucumber but the elements are more whole. The other breakfast sandwich I can do is vegan with a mung bean thing. So I have scrambled eggs, avocado, Violife—I try not to eat cheese and dairy, though we can put real cheese in it—microgreens, mayo, and then basically any kind of verde sauce, it’s your choice. And tempeh bacon. If I’m going to be a human being for another 40 years, I have to make breakfast, and eventually I’m gonna make it to lunch and then dinner. Maybe I’ll get into baking.

Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album Tranquilizer can be purchased at the Warp website and at Bandcamp.

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The album cover for Tranquilizer

Thank you for reading the 195th issue of Tone Glow. We gotta make it to lunch.

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