OPN @ Le Centquatre, Paris
Have I reached peak Oneohtrix Point Never? And how would I even know?
Seeing post-ambient experimentalist Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN) in concert in April this year performing his latest album, Again, in its entirety was a strange but thrilling experience. But I couldn't help wondering whether witnessing one of my favourite digital artists "live" represented a "peak" moment, after which the gloss of the unknown seems slightly less buffed.
I first encountered Lopatin's music via a digital "mixtape" (i.e. a zip folder of .mp3 files: look how old I am ... ) that Animal Collective released ahead of their curation of the 2011 All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the United Kingdom. OPN's contribution to the tape, the jaw-dropping "Physical Memory", has since gotten me through many long-distance bus, train and plane trips.
In fact, I've long considered this stunning instrumental, which clocks in at just under 11 minutes, as OPN's opus. Which is unbelievable given the material he's issued in the 15 years since its release. But when "Physical Memory" came along, I re-entered a world of ambient music with which I was already familiar, to some extent. Because without wanting to appear cocky about it, me and ambient go way back.
Among my first exposures to recorded music, I recall listening to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in its entirety (while lying on my back) in our family home on the New South Wales north coast in the late 1970s. It was that kind of time and place. As a teenager I also listened to a lot of atmospheric music: Vangelis, Enya, Clannad, you know the drill. Due to my Tubular Bells experience, I have always associated ambient music with meditation. I've also been through my "white noise" phase, and a "rain sounds" phase while recovering from labyrinthitis in the middle of a bone-cold Swedish winter. This stuff just seems to stick to me.
Lopatin's early EPs, most prominently Russian Mind (2009) and Zones Without People (also 2009), are crammed with epic, analogue synthesiser-infused tracks that seem to go on forever. For the full effect, seek out a copy of the 2012 edition of the Rifts compilation.
Sometimes I wish these songs would go on forever. In the spirit of YouTubers uploading hour-long loops of MBV instrumental codas, I've even considered doing the same with the first half of OPN's "Format and Journey North". Just so I can listen to it over and over again. But there's no point expecting someone to issue the same album ad infinitum. By the time of the release of Returnal (2010), which could be considered OPN's "proper" first album (although these labels are essentially meaningless in the digital era), Lopatin had already moved on.
Screeching noise tracks intersperse with fractured soundscapes and sample-triggering audioverses on OPN's subsequent releases in the 2010s, including Replica (2011), R Plus Seven (2013), Garden of Delete (2015) and Age Of (2018). It's not until the pandemic era that OPN returned, as it were, to his ambient roots. However, as you'd expect, this "return" ("slight", maybe?) had a catch: Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (2020) presented itself as a concept radio station album, somewhat reminiscent of Animal Collective's Centipede Hertz (2012). Across the album, traces of post-ambient compete with fragments of DJ voices, radio station carts and warped overdubs, with most tracks too short to hang a hook on. Although "Long Road Home", featuring Caroline Polachek on guest vocals, is a rather bodacious opener.
Which brings us, finally, to Again (2023), Lopatin's most recent long player. While the album's release and tour provided me with a reason to purchase tickets to see him perform at Le Centquatre in Paris' grungy 19th arrondisement, I have to admit I hadn't paid the music itself much attention. I almost felt, in the lead up to the event, that I may have reached (or passed) my own personal peak OPN. Call it ambient fatigue, or even middle age. Then again, having never seen OPN live, and probably never getting a chance to do so again, I could treat it as a birthday present, and bring my better half along as well. Right? What did I have to lose?
A mere EUR 44, as it turns out. Or EUR 88 to experience the night with someone else. Plus EUR 2 each for the cloak room. And EUR 3 each for a plastic cup of ginger beer (no ice). Oh and EUR 4 each for a croque monsieur purchased from a boulangerie as we passed by in the slow-moving queue outside the venue. In other words, EUR 106 for a three-hour experience. Which is entirely reasonable, seeing I'd never once paid a cent for any of OPN's works since first hearing "Physical Memory". Unless you count the micro-cent OPN may have received from Spotify as a result of my constant playback of his greatest hits.
The setlist, as ever, is unreliable. Having not paid much attention to the album itself, I didn't recognise many of the tracks. But I'm pretty sure most of them were pretty much new, jam versions of whatever was recorded on Again, anyway. The event felt much more like a rave up than an ambient noodling session, although at times it managed to be both.
And therein lay the problem: what I really wanted was an ambient soundscape, an event where I could lie down on a bean bag and listen to the music while lava-lamp visuals rained down on the heads of myself, my better half and maybe three or four other people in the vast space of an aircraft hangar or planetarium.
Instead, we spent the three hours standing on a cold concrete floor, surrounded by very earnest people very much like us, waiting for sliced beats and click tracks to build into stadium-sized bangers, only to be left with one numbed foot in mid-air as each fragment of an idea was whisked away and replaced by something even more doom-laden. Actually, when I put it like that, it doesn't sound too bad at all. LOL.
But being parents with children and responsibilities, we did not make it to the end of the show. Which was fine: by then, OPN was playing older songs like "Sleep Dealer" anyway. As we headed to the cloak room, we noticed a raised level at the back of the venue where about ten people were lying on novelty deckchairs (the type you see in pictures of old ocean liners).
That's where we should have been! Instead of down the front, inhaling cheap vape smoke intermingled with dry ice, gamely clutching our now-warm plastic cups filled with flat ginger beer and wondering how much longer we would last. No matter, the visuals (reminiscent of Beck's puppet troupe at Rock en Seine almost 20 years ago!) by Freeka Tet and Nate Boyce were great. Think a miniature version of OPN trapped inside a DJ booth while vape smoke swirls around him. Very much a world within a world that added to the cumulative effect of the music.
Anyway, if attending an OPN concert could give me some kind of closure on the past 15 years of my life, then it was worth it. As to whether that closure has actually occurred, how would I ever really know?