Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never or OPN) is a Massachusetts-born, New York City-based avant-garde musician, producer, and composer. Over the last fifteen years he’s built up an impressive solo catalog of modern electronic classics such as R Plus Seven and Replica while frequently collaborating with the most streamed artist in the world, The Weeknd, and scoring highly acclaimed films like Good Time and Uncut Gems. Back in September Daniel released Again, the tenth OPN album and a cosmic prog-y exploration of an imagined collaboration between Lopatin’s current and younger selves, a rumination on what's remembered and what’s forgotten. The 13 track record also features wide ranging contributions from Robert Ames, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth), Xiu Xiu, and lovelivescrushing. You can catch him live in New York City at the Brooklyn Paramount on April 26th to close out his world tour— you can find tickets here. Lucky for us, Daniel is here to tell us what he’s been into.
Writer Andy Sturdevant put together a booklet of active cafeteria menu hotline numbers throughout the USA. It’s a sort of zine and I consider it to be a true work of art. I like to keep a copy in the studio within an arm’s reach. When I hit a roadblock, I like to pick a number at random to call and check out what’s being served at some hospital canteen. Having been doing this for a while, you notice little things– the voices in the background, a burst of laughter, odd pauses, the mood of the thing. Really though, it’s an anodyne list of daily food options in different places where life unfolds in overlooked ways, which is oddly nice to listen to, like a prank phone call without the cruelty. As an aside– this zine pairs nicely with Letters To Wendys – a book of poetry by Joe Wenderoth. I guess I just like stuff involving bland food.
Open access and the preservation of digital artifacts are causes I can get behind, so I’m going to give The Internet Archive some appreciation here. I spend quite a bit of time browsing their offerings, some of which have made their way into my art projects. You’ll have to take your own trip with it, but some of my personal highlights include: a complete archive of Mondo 2000 magazines, a collection of K-Mart background music from a former employee (recently denoised by another IA user), and the Noise-Arch collection which pulls together many gigs of underground tape cassettes from the 1980s-90s. Recently I started using a ChatGPT Chrome extension and put it to work reading entire PDFs, searching for keywords, summarizing etc. Pretty awesome library school / digital hoarder / subvertainment stuff, if you like that sort of thing.
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Growing up in a Russian household, you become acquainted with the ritual of evening walks after dinner. Beyond its obvious health benefits, there’s a spiritual dimension to the act itself— believe it or not, with my headphones on and my sneakers laced up I’m a biomechanical contemplation machine. A heightened awareness of the landscape and my place in it overcomes me, I might occasionally notice great and strange things. The more aimless the walk is, the better. Getting your steps in is good, but not everything in life needs to be about self-improvement. I find that the longer my walks are, the weirder and more hypnotic they become. The gratitude I feel when I finally return home is really a nice feeling too. For a walking shoe, I recommend Mephistos which feel like gliding on air. Happy trails.
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What else could I possibly need? Maybe a nice pair of winter socks. Some people like merino wool, but I prefer warmer, more durable alpaca, which feels great, if not better. The use of alpaca wool as a textile has its origins in the Andes thousands of years ago, where the Incas revered and even deified alpacas. Often depicted as gentle and giving creatures, alpacas are emblematic of the Andean landscape, I’d love to see it in person one day. Knowledge about the animals and how to care for them was passed down through generations, which is pretty much a non-factor when browsing for socks on Amazon. So be careful you’re not getting ripped off with synthetic ones claiming otherwise.
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There is nothing more comforting to me than listening to Terrence Mckenna talk– he jams out with words in such a way that I find myself entranced and very, very sleepy. His lectures are readily available on the internet, and most are long enough to sustain that initial descent through hypnagogic tunnels and down into the underworld. I do have a requirement, which is that Mckenna himself must do the talking. An audiobook narrated by a neutral sounding professional voice actor will not do. For the uninitiated, McKenna has some very electrifying ideas about the nature of reality. However, I wouldn’t know much about it because his gentle and strangely metered way of speaking knocks me out after about 20 minutes of listening. Sweet dreams.
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