Album Review: Tranquilizer by Oneohtrix Point Never

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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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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