Daniel Lopatin w ostatnich latach pojawia się w Krakowie bardzo regularnie. Dwukrotnie był gościem festiwalu UNSOUND a 22. września wystąpił podczas finału festiwalu Sacrum Profanum obok m.in. Emiki, Chrisa Clarka, duetu Skalpel i orkiestry Aukso. Jego zatopione w latach 80. syntezatorowe, psychodeliczne dźwięki oraz specyficzne podejście do kompozycji sprawiają, że projekt Oneohtrix Point Never cieszy się uznaniem słuchaczy i krytyków na całym świecie. Dowodem uznania dla jego twórczości są oferty współpracy ze strony legendarnych wytwórni – Editions Mego oraz WARP. Jego najnowsza płyta - „R Plus 7” - ukaże się 30 września. Tuż przed występem w Krakowie Daniel Lopatin dał się namówić na krótką rozmowę.

Daniel Lopatin has been a regular guest to Cracow in recent years. He has played the UNSOUND festival twice, and as we spoke he was about to take the stage at the Sacrum Profanum festival with the likes of Emika, Chris Clark and the Polish dup Skalpel. His 80s synth-psychedelia and a unique approach to composition have won Oneohtrix Point Never praise on both sides of the Atlantic. On top of that he had the opportunity to work with some of the most respected labels in electronic and experimental music, including Editions Mego and now WARP. His new album “R Plus 7” is due for release on the 30 of September. Right before he took to the stage in Cracow we had the opportunity to have a little talk.

Wojciech Barczyński: This is your third visit to Cracow, this time you will be performing a piece by Witold Lutoslawski. How were you approached to do this.

Daniel Lopatin: They sent me a few pieces to choose from and I was very curious about the „Preludes”, being that they were very short. I liked that format. I had a chat with my mom, who is a piano teacher and studied musicology. I listened to the pieces and decided that that would be the best thing to work through.

Was classical music a part of you musical education? Did you learn how to read music?

Yes, but I wasn't terribly good at it. She attempted to teach me when I was a kid. I quit a few times, but I think the stuff that she taught me, particularly about harmony, really basic stuff, was really important even though I don't utilize it in a very straightforward way. It helps me improvise.

What is your work method, because a lot of electronic music producers have to really restrain themselves when it comes to starting new pieces of music. It's always tempting to start something new than to really concentrate on a piece and finish it.

Usually I try to work from an idea, a concept. Deal with some kind of formal characteristics of something that I'm trying to imbue through music. So abstraction is a kind of method that I work through, characterization, thing like that. Usually it starts with sounds and a palette that can feel like a way to formally create or gesturally create a scene and then I start trying to understand what I can do with it, with dynamics, song form or whatever. So usually it starts with an idea about sound or an idea about music and how it can characterize the world around me and I kind of go from there.

Let's talk about dynamics for a second. It's a lost art, wouldn't you say?

Some people do it very well. I would imagine it's just something you have consider when you deal with sound. It seems pretty obvious to me.

There's a lot of stuff out there that sounds ridiculously pumped.

Yeah, in terms of popular music everything is slammed pretty hard, because generally they're trying to make sure that it's heard. If your car is loud or the highway is loud, it needs to cut through.

I think that's something you have in common with classical composers, you play with dynamics, you utilize the possibilities that it brings. Does that come from listening to classical music when you were younger?

Yeah, definitely. But I also get distracted from dynamics all the time because I also like music that's kind of aggressive or just consistently compressed or limited the way popular music is. It's not all bad. And certainly there's something about the contrast between modes of listening that I try to characterize. I don't think I was aware of dynamics until much later. I can't remember it as something that I was taught. It's kind of an built-in anti-social thing for me, because the quieter something is the more difficult it is to hear, the less it is understandable. I think it would be interesting to create quieter music in the future.

In a recent interview you said that how a track or a whole album will sound can be determined by a single piece of equipment that you are infatuated with at the time.

That's true. I enjoy the way that an instrument tells me to play. There's a built-in historicised feeling to certain instruments. If you sat me down at a Wurlitzer or Fender Rhodes next to each other I would play them with certain idiomatic references in my head. Not because I'm virtuosic and I can play like Steely Dan or Ray Charles, but because as a fan of music I know that those timbres or those textures are historicised. My first step with sound is to always listen to to see how it manipulates me and that can a kind of control on which I introduce my own variables. But I like to manipualted by the historical texture of music.

Was there an instrument or a piece of hardware that particularly influenced you when recording “R Plus 7”?

“R Plus 7” was mostly software, but I was using a lot of sounds that were emulating acoustic\c instruments. At least on that level I was pretty infatuated with organs and choirs and things like that but what I was using was “in the box”.

Obviously things are moving way faster now in terms of how artists influence other artists, but do you think that 10 or 20 years from now someone will pick-up a Juno 60 synth and will start playing it with Oneohtrix Point Never in mind?

That depends on how popular those old records of mine will become, but it would be fun, yeah. It would be rewarding to know that I had some kind of a small impact on tendencies of people who use certain instruments. At the same time I try to kind of move forward and find new things and try not to festishise the instruments too much because it becomes too sentimental. It's a beautiful instrument, I love it very much, I still own the same one I had my whole life. I hope there's someone around to repair it 20 years from now and maybe I'll give it to somebody.

Recently I've been listening to a few producers from Russia and Belarus and what they have in common is that they are influenced by a lot of the things that they didn't have access to, but their peers in the West had, like Nintendo, VHS movies. They have a unique perspective of looking at the early days of electronic music from much different place. Was that your experience as well, of looking at America and American culture from the outside?

Mostly I was a student of synthesizer music in general, so being infatuated with synthesizers you naturally focus on the Renaissance period for the instrument, which at least to me is the 1980s and 1990s. Back then you didn't have to have a huge are of training or specialization in to get access to instruments. What happens in that scenario is that a lot of people are making very strange things because they have access to these instruments and they have access to record them. So I was dealing with ideas around that and it naturally lent itself to the music, but I'm fundamentally not a really nostalgic person.


Fragmenty wywiadu opublikowane zostaną w programie Pociąg do muzyki w środę 25 września po 18.00.