Replica is not a comfortable listen. The tension that permeates Daniel Lopatin’s second album proper under this moniker is not something that the artist has explored to any significant extent before. The onslaught of white noise ‘Nil Admirari’ notwithstanding, his album of last year, Returnal, sat politely on the periphery, consisting of syrupy synth drones and gently swaying arpeggiated chords. Replica on the other hand is a winding labyrinth of warped loops and disembodied vocal samples, with (mostly) not a synth in sight, and marks a striking, and altogether welcome, aesthetic and sonic departure for Oneohtrix Point Never.
The collages Lopatin constructs here are slyly impenetrable, bordering the realms of musique concrète whilst always maintaining a mischievous edge that prevents the record from feeling at all clinical. Dicing and contorting his samples sometimes to the point of complete abstraction, the enjoyment Lopatin has gleaned from the process of making these pieces is apparent throughout; songs rarely settle into a comfortable rhythm, instead existing in a constant state of hyperactivity, with multiple ideas and wildly varied sounds crammed into the space of a few minutes.
Often lumped in with the ‘hypnagogic’ scene of musicians, whose work attempts to recreate the dream-like quality of distant childhood memories through the use of lo-fi recording techniques and references to '80s pop culture, Lopatin’s music has always been primarily concerned with nostalgia. Where the swooning synths of his previous works created a vague soundtrack to that woozy state of mind at the beginnings of sleep, the samples on Replica have provided Lopatin with a more concrete set of reference points with which to explore this theme. The use of samples to create illusions of nostalgia is not exactly a radical technique – long have dusty old soul and jazz samples been forging emotional connections with hip hop fans – but Replica takes the approach to such extremes that its ten songs come to completely inhabit their own surrealist aural world haunted by half-remembered sounds and voices.
The effect is at times unsettling and despite the album’s fairly skeletal construction, the experience of listening to Replica can be stiflingly claustrophobic. The rhythmic structure of ‘Nassau’ is centred around a brief voice sample – a particularly awkward clash of syllables that can occur in speech as one word ends and another starts – lending the track a fidgety, anxious edge. Skirted by buzzing electronics and joined later by the chime of a piano, the voice repeats ad infinitum as if destined forever to be trapped in limbo mid-sentence, unable to move forwards in time. This feeling of incompleteness pervades the entire album, Replica’s heavy atmosphere pregnant with an expectation never fulfilled, and the result is a beautifully hypnotic listen. The spotlighting of such tiny details as the precise inflections of speech is a technique used often throughout the record, mimicking the way our memories can amplify the minutiae of everyday life and songs like ‘Nassau’ lead the listener through a sinister exaggerated reality where everything is slightly out of proportion.
On occasion, Lopatin takes a more traditional approach to composition, most notably on the title track. Presenting a repeating figure of sombre piano chords which is gradually enveloped in waves of synths and processed noise, ‘Replica’ takes an unusually standard form, lacking in the otherworldliness and originality of the album’s more bizarre arrangements. Although the juxtaposition of organic beauty against harsh digital noise is a powerful and affecting thing, the tension present on this track feels artificially synthesised, almost forced, and sticks out as rather emotionally crude in such subtle surroundings. For the most part, however, Lopatin gives his audience a great deal of credit, and it is in his unwillingness to create a record that provides easy answers that Replica has its greatest strength. Surely his defining work to date, and probably the most fully realised release within the confines of hypnagogia, Replica is a baffling, unnerving and effortlessly skilful album by an artist who seems to grow in stature with each new release.