I visit Boston, my old home, a lot. I have friends there still in college; my old school is there; and my favorite bar is there. Needless to say, there are a lot of memories in that city. But I also feel a personal sense of decay every time I visit, and I never felt it more than this weekend when I saw Oneohtrix Point Never — one of the best shows I’ve ever seen (but more on that later). When I walked into my old bar — my former go-to spot to take dates, all exes now — to get a drink, the usual bartender (Michael) was still there and instantly recognized me, but for most of the new staff, I was a stranger where I used to be a regular. It was also my first time in town since The Boston Phoenix stopped publishing, which is where I got my first job working at a print publication (I was spending my time last week screen-capping my writing on their website before they all turn into a big 404 error), and later, at an after party from a memorial for a friend who had passed away last year, I bumped into someone I had worked with in college. He was embarrassed because he couldn’t remember my name, which I said was nothing to feel bad about: I couldn’t remember his either.
Not to say any of these feelings are unique; in fact, they are extremely mundane. But while none of it was at the forefront of my mind when I went to see Oneohtrix Point Never at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, that changed when Daniel Lopatin, a master at playing with decaying memory, started performing. Anyone who has listened to Replica knows he has a way of injecting these thoughts into your mind, subconsciously or not. The performance, titled Reliquary House, with visuals by Nate Boyce, has been done before at MoMA, but we were given a huge shock right beforehand: The program director made his announcements and then casually ended with, “I just talked to Dan, and he said he has mostly new material tonight.” Before that massive news could even really be processed by any of us, Lopatin and Boyce came out and started.
A reliquary is a sort of shrine that houses ancient relics, and in this case, these relics are commercials: bruised, beaten, broken, and warped in all their beauty. And, with the all-new material (a new album is coming soon, but no details have yet been revealed), Oneohtrix Point Never has progressed the style of Replica beyond anything I could have imagined. The music is a massive collage of memories that are at times stunningly beautiful, sad, dissonant, and spiritual, all of it paired perfectly with Nate Boyce’s hyperreal digital sculptures projected above them. The pairing is very appropriate due to the way OPN’s new songs sound so three-dimensional, ebbing and flowing from overwhelmingly dense to airy and smooth. This time around, he gives the samples more room to breathe, with moments of tremendously heavy beats that just explode out of the mix. Ghostly samples of choirs haunt tracks, and to see him trigger samples in his intense way is genuinely exciting to watch.
One of the major questions I had before going to the show may be a little inevitable. Daniel Lopatin is perhaps the most influential person on the vaporwave scene (it has evolved tremendously, but Chuck Person’s eccojams still remain a blueprint), and I was hoping to see if there was a reaction or a response to it in his new music. And there is. It’s difficult to describe how, and it might just be me hearing him live again with the reappropriative musical context of 2012 in mind, but artists like New Dreams Ltd. (Macintosh Plus) and James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual felt like reference points in the new music but absent when he finished the set with “Nassau” and (an awesomely dissonant version of) “Child Soldier.” The perfect moment for me, though, came roughly 30 minutes in: after triggering a choral sample over a sea of throbbing percussion, Lopatin actually sat on the floor, back against his table of electronics (and the audience), and looked up at the projector, watching, just his head in view. For just a moment, he was soaking everything in, just as we were.
The first time I saw Oneohtrix Point Never play was about two months before Replica was released. I spoke to him after the show and told him I’d been listening to my promo of the album, and I honestly thought it was the best album of the year. Three months and one perfect score later, TMT named it just that. It’s still early, and we can’t know for sure what the new album will really be like, but after leaving the show with a new perspective on contemporary electronic music, on this city, and maybe a little on myself too, I know one thing for sure: Something is coming from Oneohtrix Point Never, and it is going to be huge.