Today, Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN / Daniel Lopatin) releases the visionary “Black Snow” alongside a striking self-directed video. “Black Snow” is the first song to be released from the forthcoming album Age Of (June 1, Warp Records).
The lyrics on “Black Snow” take their inspiration from Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit he co-founded; a 1990’s collective of artist-philosophers that produced works of performance art, poetry and fiction and is most definitely worth a late-night internet spiral or two. The original text is detourned into a lyric that equates the incomprehensible hugeness of nuclear war to UHF fuzz, whilst addressing the idea that we are a species destined for confusion. The song’s breakdown is courtesy of a uniqle instrument invented by Hans Reichel in 1987 called the Daxophone, and the outro is dominated by a house music-inspired organ riff shot through waves of noise. An extremely catchy, mutated pop song whose ancestry might fall somewhere between the mood of The Seventh Continent and Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had A Rocket Launcher.”
Terrifying and comforting in turns, OPN juggles beautiful pop riffs with demented minimalism and gut-grasping harmony, plunging into deep seas of color and tearing out threads of melody. The material may feel alien, but the scale of the thing is most decidedly – and affectingly – human. We are in for something truly special.
Age Of Tracklist
01 Age Of
02 Babylon
03 Manifold
04 The Station
05 Toys 2
06 Black Snow
07 myriad.industries
08 Warning
09 We’ll Take It
10 Same
11 RayCats
12 Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen
13 Last Known Image of a Song
){kind=link}