Album Review: Tranquilizer by Oneohtrix Point Never

Daniel Lopatin's Tranquilizer arrives with a deceptively calm title for an album stuffed to the gills with sounds and samples--and his best work since Replica. That 2011 album redefined what ambient and sample-based music could do by treating cultural detritus as psychic archaeology. Since then he's gone maximalist (Garden of Delete), baroque (Age Of), diaristic (Again), and cinematic (Magic Oneohtrix Point Never).

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Although he's gracefully toed the line between the underground and the mainstream, collaborating with some of the most popular artists making music today (Rosalía, the Weeknd) and scoring television and films, his acclaimed solo records have continued to challenge and impress, always looking forward while reaching back. On his latest album, the ironically-titled Tranquilizer, Lopatin embraces '90s technology and the unpredictable ephemerality of the internet to create an album that explores the tenuous and fragile relationship between archives, commerciality, composition and collective memory. Lopatin formed Tranquilizer's sputtering, ethereal soundscapes from an archive of '90s sample CDs that he found on the Internet Archive.

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On his 11th album, producer Daniel Lopatin saves the best for last With an arsenal of glitchy samples, intricate MIDI programming and slithering synth leads, Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never has worked his way into the A-list of experimental electronica. It's not that all of his records are revolutionary; rather that they all contribute to an admirably coherent aesthetic, where neglected elements of culture are reassessed and reassembled. The specific inspiration for Tranquilizer was a collection of construction kits, which presumably were intended to help producers create new-agey ambient music, but of course nothing on the record itself is that easy to define.

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With Tranquilizer, his 11th album under his Oneohtrix Point Never alias, Daniel Lopatin reaches deeply into a strange fusion of circuitry and biology that he hasn't explored this directly since 2013's R Plus Seven. A zone where synthetic tones mimic organic movement and vice versa, the album settles rather neatly into that charged space, glowing and glitching in equal measure, fragile in shape and built from pure artifice. Composed entirely from audio samples scavenged from the Internet Archive, Tranquilizer feels like a spiritual successor to 2011's melancholic Replica, which mined samples of TV ads sourced from VHS tapes from the '80s and '90s to forge its monochromatic sound.

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