Review of Oneohtrix Point Never at The Button Factory, Dublin – April 12th 2011
Review by Liam Cagney
Last Tuesday evening saw the debut Irish concert by Oneohtrix Point Never, at the Button Factory in Dublin.
Oneohtrix Point Never is the alias of Brooklyn-based electronic music producer Daniel Lopatin. Though not the most memorable of names, it serves nevertheless to recall artists with similarly abstruse nomenclature – such as Autechre, Aphex Twin, or Mira Calix – whose music represents a good range of reference for Oneohtrix Point Never’s own audio experimentation.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s music is a lush ambient swirl of analogue sounds and environmental samples, whose subtle pitch-shifts and mass- layering combines to form textures shot through with a delirious logic. Aural signposts are Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream and Orbus Terrarum-era The Orb. But despite such readiness to hand of generic classifications, Oneohtrix Point Never’s combination of 80’s drum-machines, vintage synthesizers and other old equipment is distinctly his own, and stands out as very much of the moment.
There has been an accordant buzz in the media. In 2009 the album Rifts was named No. 2 album of the year by The Wire, trumping releases by Sunn O))), Shackleton and The Animal Collective. More recently articles have appeared in The Guardian and courtesy of Simon Reynolds in The Village Voice. Following the well-received release last year of the album Returnal on Editions Mego, this widening of appeal looks set to continue.
But at the moment this remains underground music, and unless you’d an ear planted to the ground you wouldn’t have known about this Dublin gig: no posters appeared around town and next to nothing appeared on the internet. A shame, because Oneohtrix Point Never’s Irish fan base is likely small enough as it is, and the audience looked to be only a fraction of it.
The gig was all-seated, with the floor of The Button Factory decked out in rows of plastic chairs, a prospect I’d never witnessed before and which at first felt uncomfortable, but whose sense became apparent as the night wore on.
After a warm-up set of weird DJ Screw-influenced retro-futuristic house by fellow NYC resident Games (aka Joel Ford of the group Tigercity) – which felt inappropriate given the seated audience, who duly tapped its feet along to the beats, eyes glued to the striking background visuals, a mash-up of Miami and New York cityscape’s in iridescent colours bookended by faces morphing in and out of each other, the whole evoking vague memories of getting up on a Saturday morning to watch The Chart Show on ITV in the early 90’s – Oneohtrix Point Never took to the stage.
He greeted the audience by remarking how comfortable everyone looked reclined in their plastic seats. He then described what would follow: not a gig in the normal sense where he would simply perform music onstage, but a multimedia show where his music would run alongside a visual track projected onto a white screen behind him. The introduction was delivered in a self-deprecating manner that didn’t suggest the show to follow would be any great shakes.
Great shakes it was. The set kicked off with a blast of static white noise and sine tones reminiscent of ‘Nil Admirari’ off Rifts. Soon this settled into more a reassuringly harmonic texture mixed with sounds of tapes being wound down and sped up. The visual-projections dominated the stage, at first showing a computer graphic of a sort of virtual staircase in black with rainbow hues flowing and dripping from it. As the music flared up so too did the visuals, different frames being shot in and out of the original one to create a flickering effect.
You worried for any epileptics in the house. Soon, though, any such worries were vanquished – not by a lessening of the crazy, acid trip visuals, but rather by their opposite amplification and the attendant hypnotic affect. This was a multimedia show through-and-through and one brilliantly executed. For the hour-or-so duration music and visuals were totally complicit, to such an entrancing degree that you soon forgot the distinction between them, as if you were watching the music and listening to the visuals.
The concept of this reminded me of The Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms video from the early 90’s. This is partly due to the visual style of artist Nate Boyce, focused on computer-generated presentations of geometric and mechanical forms, multicoloured and multifaceted, with the impression of early-90’s virtual reality graphics like those featured in The Lawnmower Man. The music similarly dwelt in retro-futuristic impressions (the futuristic use of ‘old’ equipment), and swept along in one unbroken flood for the whole set, drowning everything in its path.