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Out of context: Reply #196
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- ukit0
Had to repost this...probably my favorite album of the year
'Rifts' is a double disc collection of three hugely essential albums of psycho-sythual experimentation produced by Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never for the Arbor and No Fun imprints. Much like his contemporaries Emeralds, Lopatin is one of those enviably prolific underground figures, constantly committing his experiments to limited runs of sought-after CDRs and cassettes over the last two years.
To shed a little light on his background, his father was a member of Russian psych outfit The Flying Dutchmen, and owner of a Juno 60 and Hohner Stringer. So it's easy to draw a line to his eerie analog synth sound, reminiscent of Kluster, Schulze or more recently, Boards Of Canada.
It's this latter influence which has become more prominent in OPN's recent sound, as he's condensed his psychoactive scope from dilated 10 min+ prog trips, to more miniaturised scapes reminiscent of BoC's cherished interludes like opener 'Behind The Bank', or the lush lunar missions of The Ghost Box label with 'Actual Air'.
He's also cleverly anchored the abstraction of his pure synthesizer music with brilliantly evocative concepts tied to each of the LP's, from the stoned cosmonaut having a bad day on 'Betrayed In The Octagon', to scenes of an alien planet very similar to our own on 'Zones Without People' and the construct of the aforementioned Russian spaceman composing the score to a film from his deathbed in 'Russian Mind'.
It's that sense of nostalgia, or a yearning for lost sci-fi futures also shared by Leyland Kirby that makes this collection a personal experience sure to dock with the emotional receptors of folks (like ourselves) who are susceptible to it. At twenty seven tracks, this is surely one of the most essential and absorbing releases of the year. Essential Purchase.