Oneohtrix Point Never - Age Of - LP Vinyl

The tenth album from Daniel Lopatin is his most collaborative and accessible solo project to date, yet still full of unexpected chaos and songs that can suddenly dissolve and disarm. Age Of spills over many of the formal and conceptual boundaries set by previous OPN records. After working with Anohni on her debut solo album Hopelessness, Lopatin found himself drawn to the process of collaborating with other artists, a stark contrast to the cerebral solo labor that had driven his work to date. Instead of going it alone again, Lopatin looped in James Blake to co-produce and mix the album. Anohni and noise artist Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) lent vocals to several tracks, while Eli Keszler supplied live drums and multi-instrumentalist Kelsey Lu played keyboards. Strikingly, Lopatin sings lead on four songs, threading his distorted voice through jagged electronics for the first time since 2010’s Returnal. The inclusion of more pop-friendly artists and the foregrounding of the human voice might suggest that Age Of ranks among OPN’s more accessible pieces. If anything, it’s one of his most challenging. Sound objects drift in and out of focus like space debris from a forgotten explosion; slick, retrofuturistic synthesizers commingle with harsh noise; the record’s most conventional song, “Babylon,” ends abruptly, like someone unplugged it. The songs on Age Of are chaotic. They do not behave the way you expect them to, and their deviations from the energetic scripts of popular music ripple like tremors through the ground.

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