ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER - R Plus Seven

Landing somewhere between the chopped-up samples of 2011's Replica and MIDI-synth simulacra of the sort that James Ferraro mischievously dropped with that same year's Far Side Virtual, Daniel Lopatin's first album for Warp alternately scrambles and soothes, with most of its ten tracks flitting from glossy hyperactivity to meditative, minimal nu-new age.

"Aesthetically, Lopatin's palette for R Plus Seven consists of familiar tropes: its 10 tracks are full of brash and staccato timbres, constructed upon repetitive, nonsensical, and dislocated samples, as if fast-forwarded through. He appears curiously preoccupied by reinventing only the most piercing of preset instruments. There are liberal helpings of dyspeptic cheesiness, and his MIDI-patch choirs put the 'phony' back in polyphony. But unlike Lopatin's preceding releases, a complex compositional strategy is afoot here. There is almost no formless wandering, and the album feels far more like a carefully constructed and well-paced narrative than a slapdash assembly of half-baked ideas." - The Quietus

"Lopatin is a composer who is primarily interested in the possibilities of splicing together synthetic instruments, subliminal frequencies, and the inherent uncanniness of everyday sounds. He's less interested in guiding his alien orchestras to a finessed crescendo than he is prone to hard cutting each melodic phrase, scrambling and twisting each rhythmic pattern, and running every chance of emotional catharsis into a strategically placed oblivion...The most commonly used sound across R Plus Seven is the human voice. It rampantly appears—singing, hiccuping, speaking, gasping, groaning, etc.—in all 10 of the tracks, but not a single syllable or vocal tone is 'real,' so to speak. Whether sampled or synthesized, every voice—which, it should be noted, is the most organic musical instrument there is—was altered or constructed in some digital fashion, never once performed or recorded 'live' for these compositions. There's something subtly dissociative about listening to appropriated voices for nearly an hour, and Oneohtrix Point Never knows it." - XLR8R