"A decade and a half ago, Daniel Lopatin shelled out what might be the best hundred bucks he ever spent. On the internet, he'd come across a guy selling bootleg DVD compilations of decades-old TV commercials culled from Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime soaps, and late-night cable: Wrigley's spearmint gum, Hershey's chocolate bars, Heinz Alphagetti. Dated, kitschy stuff, thick with chintzy synths and VHS buzz."
"The origins of Tranquilizer, Lopatin's new album under his Oneohtrix Point Never alias, are strikingly similar. This time, it's rooted in a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin found on the Internet Archive in the early 2020s. He bookmarked the page with the vague intention of using them in a future project; then they disappeared, presumed casualties of a DMCA takedown notice, and he moved on."
Daniel Lopatin constructed Tranquilizer from commercial sample CDs obtained via the Internet Archive, embracing their disappearance and resurfacing as an emotional and conceptual focus. The album transforms dated jingles and lo-fi textures—chintzy synths, VHS noise, and jingle fragments—into dense, ambient-expressionist pieces that feel both elegiac and unsettling. A DMCA takedown that briefly removed the archived files sharpened the theme of impermanence and inspired an attempt to sonically capture an era where material is endlessly archived yet continually slipping away. Tranquilizer continues Lopatin's practice of found-sound collage and memory-inflected electronic composition.
Read at Pitchfork
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