Oneohtrix Point Never Announces New Album Garden of Delete Via Internet Rabbit Hole

This morning, Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, updated his website with a link to a cryptic PDF. In the text, Lopatin writes a hallucinatory letter about attempting to work on new music, before beginning to collaborate with an alien named Ezra. The PDF includes a questionnaire said to be taken by the alien, in which a link to a blog is included.

On that blog is a series of mysterious posts backdated to 1994, the most recent of which is an extended interview between Lopatin and Ezra. In that interview, Lopatin appears to announce a new album called Garden of Delete (“or G.O.D. for short”), which he says will be out in November. Check out the blog here, and find the salient details below.

There’s a lot going on here, obviously, but in the interview, Ezra presents questions allegedly asked by Oneohtrix Point Never fans. One question asks what the timetable for Lopatin’s new record will be. (Lopatin’s previous Oneohtrix Point Never LP, R Plus Seven, was released in 2013.)

E: “What is the timetable for the rest of the year as far as vacations, writing new material and recording is concerned? When can we expect a new album? Does it begin with the letter R?” 

D: The record is finished. I’ve spent most of the summer thinking about how I want to present it. I started writing in January, and wrapped up in July. It’ll be out in November. It’s called Garden of Delete or G.O.D. for short. The R thing is over. 

In another question, he’s asked what the album sounds like, and says it was influenced by his tour supporting Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden.

E: Would you describe the new record as cybermetal? Hypergrunge? 

D: It’s somewhat influenced by cybernetic rock. I’m aware of the hypergrunge movement. When I went on tour with NIN, Reznor gave me the green light to attempt cyberdrone for Soundgarden audiences in broad daylight. By the time Soundgarden hit the stage their fans were exausted, often irritated. So that was interesting, however the whole thing had me questioning the effectiveness of cyberdrone beyond the Live Nation context.

Tour ended and I spent time in Japan working on Manabu Namiki remixes and new songs by Anohni [Antony's new project]. When I got back home I decided to get a Kronos and I would just write using that a lot. I also got a deck of T2 trading cards which I was using as a sort of tarot.

Throughout the interview, Ezra refers to a number of songs on the record, with titles such as “Sticky Drama” (based on, according to Lopatin, “watching a lot of Vevo… and standing in my bathroom with the lights off”), “I Bite Through It” (“more about the physicality of biting through something, like what it actually feels like”), “Ezra” (named after the alien), and “Animals” (“I wanted to write a medieval cyberballad. Like the musical equivalent of Black Knight“). 

According to the interview, Lopatin will also release a short film for “Sticky Drama”. There’s also a joke about releasing the album on Tidal if it wasn’t any good, how a song is written in the style of Prurient, and how Lopatin’s main influence on the record is a (fictitious) band called Kaoss Edge. 

Read “Right Brain”, Mike Powell’s feature on Oneohtrix Point Never.

Watch Lopatin and Nate Boyce collaborate at MoMA PS1:

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