Bleep

Like the alluringly visceral artwork made by similarly multidimensional artist Matias Faldbakken, Oneohtrix Point Never clenches and crushes sound firmly in his fist, then outstretches it in his palm as he details life condensed into an hourlong nonlinear slipstream on his latest album Again. Daniel Lopatin has long been a mercurial figure in many music worlds: from vaporific eccojams to the leftfield pop of Ford & Lopatin, from award winning film scores for the Safdie brothers to the eclectic and esoteric influences of his main squeeze Oneohtrix Point Never. 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never distilled all these far-flung styles into a radio-themed retrospective, but it's the maximalist Again that truly chronicles the OPN sound, exploding and examining it at its raw, pure core.

Chronologically, the album succeeds a slew of high profile collaborations, executive producing The Weeknd’s latest Dawn FM which followed in OPN’s footsteps and Soccer Mommy’s “unsparing and compulsively replayable” Sometimes, Forever. Sonically, it follows the alternate timelines those collaborations created in their wake, as where Lopatin toys with the ephemeral structures of his "speculative autobiography", pop songwriting always manages to find its way in. Much like 2018’s Age Of, a high concept cornerstone of OPN’s sound and collaborative attitude, Again treads a thin line between upbeat accessibility and gloriously confounding experimentalism that beckons you to reverse engineer his composed contraptions.

A tangled orchestra finds form as we are thrown into the maelstrom on the very first track, strings bowed erratically like unspooling tape before fluttering with elegant poise. Rarely are such classical stylings bestowed to Lopatin’s discography, but the Robert Ames-conducted NOMAD Ensemble are a perfect fit for the album’s crisp, Frutiger Aero texture. After that, it's a U-turn into a multi-phased hyper-baroque MIDI-tropolis: voices jump in a skyrocketing confluence and synths are torqued into putty. It's an information overload simultaneously abundant and paced out, where Lopatin cracks sound and lets it spill out into a puddle of iridescent oil. One has to wonder how he fits all these manifold movements into a single song, let alone an album, as he displays a masterclass of tension and release, of immense breadth and articulation.

Sprawling and zigzagging as the album is, there’s an accessibility to Again’s swooping dramatism that makes it both a primer for the storied universe of Oneohtrix Point Never and a cornucopia for the day one fans, who have come a long way since his early tapes in the late 2000s. Magic Oneohtrix Point Never explored adjacent themes, a previous Bleep Album of the Year tracing right back to the inception of the project to revisit its many sounds and styles. Again expands and continues these histories into uncharted territory, pushing Lopatin’s talents further than ever before.

The synths of R Plus Seven’s ‘Problem Areas’ are twisted into a chirruping array on ‘Plastic Antique’, like bright drops of colour before iron slams break through the canvas into a glassy interior, not dissimilar to the analogue soundbath of Returnal. The title track’s confluence of leaping vocals meanwhile pits lesser referenced tracks like his 2012 version of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ with the searing shreds of Garden Of Delete, thrown into a bubbling pit as sinewy scraps of noise claw at these stuttering arrangements.

There’s an intricately choreographed quality to much of the album, like the spirals and flourishes of harpsichord, piano provided by the mythical Jim O'Rourke, and strings on ‘Locrian Midwest’, forming a detuned clockwork from percussive plucks made of morphing material. Or the caustically manipulated ‘Nightmare Paint’, pneumatic as it plays with form and the expectations that melodies and harmonies generate. He borrows the breathy, emo language of shoegaze on the post-post-rock 'Krumville' featuring vocals from Xiu Xiu, shimmering with grassy guitar strums and amorphous joy, meanwhile 'Memories Of Music' recalls pop ideas in an indefinable, kaleidoscopic medley of labyrinthine harmonic diversions bolstered by the guitar of another Sonic Youth vanguard, Lee Ranaldo and, epic in every sense. Yet even where Lopatin's vocals and lyrics do emerge, they're just as soon thrusted back into the dense, quantum sonic soup he's cooked up.

Again is a glorious return to abstraction informed by Daniel Lopatin's popstar detours, a fractal tree of imagination and possibilities where he climbs to a creative peak thus far, and a joyride of an album we'll be wrapping our brain's around for a while yet.