Oneohtrix Point Never: "I Bite Through It"
Last year, when Oneohtrix Point Never headed out on tour supporting Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden, Daniel Lopatin busted out a shiny new logo for the occasion. Well, maybe not so new. At the time, it seemed like a tongue-in-cheek gag—a fitting way of recognizing the head-scratching improbability of Brooklyn’s maestro of highbrow stoner ambient opening up for some of the Alternative Nation’s elder statesmen.
Listening to his new single “I Bite Through It”, though, it sounds like maybe a little bit of that logo rubbed off on Lopatin. It’s not at all difficult to imagine Korn themselves shredding through the heaviest bits of the song, which scans as a chugging approximation of nu-metal as performed by a broken microwave oven. Clearly, the time on stage changed him: Lopatin tells Rolling Stone that Garden of Delete, the followup to 2013′s R Plus Seven, is his “rock” album, complete with vocals and chord changes he laid down on the piano before ever beginning to program his sound design.
It’s hard to imagine an unplugged version of “I Bite Through It”, though a talented classical guitarist could certainly pick his or her way through the gossamer riffage that comprises the song’s more dulcet parts. But no acoustic rendition could come up with the glitch effects that send the track careening forward, or the mind-bending digital timbres that turn the act of listening into a trip through a musical wormhole. Conjuring the sound of computers dreaming their own destiny, Lopatin proves that making music with this much heart actually takes a lot of processing power.
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