Garden of Delete

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Garden of Delete
Garden of Delete.jpg
Studio album by Oneohtrix Point Never
Released November 13, 2015
Recorded January–July 2015
Brooklyn, NY
Genre
Length 45:16
Label Warp
Producer Daniel Lopatin, Paul Corley (add.)
Oneohtrix Point Never chronology
R Plus Seven
(2013)R Plus Seven2013		 Garden of Delete
(2015)
Singles from Garden of Delete
  1. "I Bite Through It"
    Released: 3 September 2015
  2. "Mutant Standard"
    Released: 21 October 2015
  3. "Sticky Drama"
    Released: 4 November 2015
  4. "Ezra"
    Released: 12 November 2015

Garden of Delete is the seventh studio album by Oneohtrix Point Never (the alias of musician Daniel Lopatin), released on 13 November 2015 on Warp Records. The album was preceded by an enigmatic internet promotional campaign, and draws on such sources as grunge music, top 40 radio, and themes of adolescence and mutation in addition to the electronic sounds of Lopatin's previous releases. It received generally positive critical reviews.

Background and recording

Following the 2013 release of R Plus Seven and work on several side projects (including video collaborations for R Plus Seven and scoring work for several films, among them Ariel Kleiman's 2015 Partisan), Lopatin was unexpectedly invited to support rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden on their 2014 joint amphitheater tour.[1][2] With the assent of NIN frontman Trent Reznor, Lopatin performed 30-minute opening sets of self-described "cyberdrone" to often vexed arena rock crowds.[3] The tour reunited him with the misanthropic 1990s rock music of his teenage years, and prompted him to reengage with his memories of adolescence and puberty,[1][2] which he described as "pretty traumatic."[4]

Upon completing the tour and returning to Brooklyn, Lopatin rented a small, windowless basement studio and began recording new material in isolation.[5] Inspirations for the recording included video hosting service Vevo, satellite radio stations such as Ozzy's Boneyard and Lithium, and the writing of French philosopher Julia Kristeva (in particular, her influential 1980 essay Powers of Horror).[4] About the latter, Lopatin explained:

[Kristeva] talks about the abject things that come out that we have desire to see. So the things that we try to contain within us is like this pre-semiotic reality and society is the way we want to present ourselves ... And yet, when the stuff comes out — like, you sneeze and you kind of want to look at the napkin for a second ... So I started thinking, that's a good formal constraint, like how do I kind of vaguely represent things that leak or things that are kind of disgusting but still seductive?[6]

Drawing on his experiences touring, he noted that "a lot of my thoughts on the record were about dealing with puberty and how your pubescent body is essentially the staging area for all this mutation."[7] In addition, the isolated recording environment encouraged an abrasive and dense sound relative to OPN's recent releases,[2] with Lopatin stating that "I was making pretty aggressive, nihilistic stuff early on and kind of went away from that for a bit. In some ways I feel like I’m back now."[1]

Composition

Lopatin expressed his desire to "make a hyperactive/depressive record"[4] and "conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions."[6] In addition to the "cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and [...] synthesized sounds" of R Plus Seven,[8] the album draws on metal, top 40 radio, EDM, alternative rock, industrial, and trance music.[4][9][10] It is the first OPN album to prominently feature "sung" vocals, which were rendered using the software instrument Chipspeech. The program allowed Lopatin to write lyrics and play them chromatically.[4] Sasha Geffen of Consequence of Sound noted nonetheless that "you only catch them in snippets inside the grotesque mesh of processing Lopatin’s used to filter them."[11] The Fader wrote that "the record, a meticulous collage of mutilated samples and computer-generated voices, careens between uncanny familiarity and total alienness."[2] The release was accompanied by a lyric sheet.[8]

Thump described Garden of Delete as "a guided tour through the producer's own psychological and physical experience of adolescence—filtered through the prism of his free-wheeling and future-gazing production style," writing that "there's beat programming that sounds like heavy metal drum fills on steroids; voices pushed to demonic, pitched extremes; testosterone-fueled guitar licks worthy of Slash himself."[7]AllMusic wrote that Lopatin "uses his music's porous boundaries brilliantly, whether he's fusing molten R&B with death metal's growls and rapid-fire kick drums on the standout "Sticky Drama," crafting dizzying juxtapositions and edits on "I Bite Through It"'s violent melancholy, or naming one of the album's most beautiful ambient pop moments after the child abuse documentary Child of Rage."[12] Scott Wilson of Fact characterized the album as "full of lurid electronic presets that sound like a guitar blasting out of a wall of amplifiers and palm-muted note runs that sound like painstakingly sequenced MIDI, a grotesque, sinewy collection of sounds that evokes the intertwined sensation of curiosity and disgust I felt browsing the horror section of my local video rental store as a child in the early 1990s."[13]

Promotional campaign

The release of Garden of Delete was preceded by an enigmatic internet promotional campaign devised by Lopatin in collaboration with friends. The project sketched out a loose fictional backstory involving Lopatin himself, an acne-ridden teenage alien blogger named Ezra, and a supposed 1990s band called Kaoss Edge.[8][14] It incorporated websites (Ezra's c. 1990s blog and Kaoss Edge's 'official' website), Twitter accounts, invented music genres (i.e. "hypergrunge") and teaser videos. Kaoss Edge's main website contains a repository of MIDI files (most from the album while others are transcripts of Allan Holdsworth's guitar solos), along with a band biography and discography with links to internet pages for unaffiliated cultural entities (i.e. flyers for prog rock band Rush, YouTube guitar tutorials) and other obscure information scattered around the site.[4][8][15] The album was announced in August 2015 via a series of internet posts originating from Lopatin's website, including an "interview" with Ezra and a cryptic PDF letter to Lopatin's fans.[16][17] The album's first single, "I Bite Through It," was released on September 3, 2015, and was followed later that month with the release of the album's MIDI files, with Lopatin encouraging fans to create their own songs from the material.[18][19][20] Second single "Mutant Standard" was released on October 21.[21] "Sticky Drama" was released on November 4, and accompanied by a two-part music video directed by Jon Rafman.[22]

Lopatin described the campaign as an attempt to “create a world where I can put into motion vague, interesting ideas, and see how they interact with each other," clarifying that "it’s not deeply plotted out, more of an ongoing experiment with the concepts floating around in my head."[23] The Quietus described the campaign as "like getting caught up in some late-night YouTube, Wikipedia rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and ill-advised medical self-diagnoses than a press release for an album, encouraging full submersion in something that was neither fact or fiction but had the quality of being somehow vital and totally necessary at that moment."[24] Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork Media wrote that "the loose, extra-musical narrative developed across a range of apocrypha that orbit the album [...] may all seem, from the outside, like so much masturbatory energy spillage, but dig deep enough, and they all become part of the larger work."[25]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source Rating
Metacritic 79/100[26]
Review scores
Source Rating
AllMusic 4/5 stars[27]
Consequence of Sound A–[11]
Exclaim! 9/10[28]
The Guardian 3/5 stars[29]
Noisey A–[30]
Pitchfork Media 8.7/10[25]
PopMatters 7/10[31]
Rolling Stone 4/5 stars[32]
Spin 8/10[33]
Tiny Mix Tapes 4.5/5[34]

Garden of Delete received generally positive reviews from critics. AllMusic's Heather Phares called the album "some of Lopatin's most intellectually engaging music as well as some of his funniest, darkest, and most cathartic."[9] Writing for Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne described the album as "absolutely gripping—strange, moving, hilarious, sometimes pushing the limits of good taste," adding that, "this time out, [Lopatin] ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones."[25] In a positive review UK magazine The Skinny described Garden of Delete in contrast to OPN's previous work as a "seemingly aggressive record; muscular in tone, schizophrenic in delivery, all the while possessing a maniacal grin on its face," calling it "Oneohtrix’s anti-ambient record."[35] Tiny Mix Tapes called the album "an unruly masterpiece of pure synthesis occurring in a post-PC Music world," writing that "with Garden of Delete, [Lopatin] sets out to implode his art in a brilliant display of cultural denial, a reflexive operation that claims a 'total loss' of cultural net-worth by damaging itself with the same semiotic structures that it indicts."[34] Kyle Carney of Exclaim! wrote that the record manages to sound accessible despite its complexities, calling it "a sound collage like no other."[28]

Writing for Consequence of Sound, Sasha Geffen called the album "OPN’s most emotional work to date and also his most ridiculous. Its tragedy is bound up with its humor; its sublimity comes from the places where it feels the most broken."[11] Uncut wrote that the album "ultimately dissolves into a beautifully arranged and slightly sickly morass of curdled pop tropes, out of which spurt a bodacious riff or glossy rave arpeggio. Oddly no-one does this better."[26] Under the Radar called it "a complex beast of shade and mood, and [...] Lopatin's best work yet."[36] For The Line of Best Fit, Jennifer Johnson opined that "GOD isn’t about sensory pleasure. It’s about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing," concluding that "It isn’t so much an album as a junk shop: that proverbial collection of oddities whose perceived value reflects more about the patron than it does the owner who placed them there."[37] In a mixed review, The Guardian's Paul McInnes wrote that "Lopatin is never quite able to stand still and enjoy some of the sounds he creates. This remains a project for only a very particular kind of pop picker."[38] In another mixed review, Dusted Magazine wrote that "at its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Delete’s rabbit hole of different directions and unexpected asides, but at other times it's easy to feel shut-out, as if you're looking in at someone's intellectual ADHD, but he's steadfastly refusing to meet your gaze."[39]

Accolades

Garden of Delete was included as one of the year's best albums by a variety of publications.

Publication Accolade Rank
Dummy The 30 Best Albums of 2015[40] 1
Fact The 50 Best Albums of 2015[41] 2
Pitchfork Top 50 Albums of the Year (2015) 11
PopMatters The 80 Best Albums of 2015[42] 7
Spin The 20 Best Avant Albums of 2015[43] 2
Stereogum The 50 Best Albums of 2015[44] 49
The Quietus The Quietus Albums of 2015[45] 8
The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2015 18

Track listing

All tracks composed by Daniel Lopatin unless otherwise specified:

No. Title Composer Length
1. "Intro"     0:27
2. "Ezra"     4:26
3. "ECCOJAMC1"     0:32
4. "Sticky Drama"     4:17
5. "SDFK"  
1:27
6. "Mutant Standard"     8:06
7. "Child of Rage"  
4:52
8. "Animals"     3:54
9. "I Bite Through It"     3:17
10. "Freaky Eyes"  
  • Lopatin
  • Roger Rodier
 6:31
11. "Lift"     4:09
12. "No Good"  
3:18
Total length:
 45:16

Sample credits

  • "ECCOJAMC1" contains a sample of "Solid Air" by John Martyn
  • "SDFK" contains samples of "Dream in White on White" by John Adams and "Brown" by Grotus
  • "Mutant Standard" contains a sample of "Funny kids being stupid with nothing better to do" published on YouTube by user TheDownunderpub
  • "Child of Rage" contains samples of an interview from the 1990 HBO documentary Child of Rage: A Story of Abuse, "My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose" by Michael Finnissy and "Cruel When Complete" by Dome
  • "Freaky Eyes" samples a portion of "Am I Supposed to Let It by Again (Above the Covers)" by Roger Rodier
  • "No Good" contains a sample of "Return of the Knodler Show" by Hans Reichel

Personnel

Credits adapted from AllMusic.[46]

  • Daniel Lopatin – composer, producer, artwork
  • Paul Corley – mixing, additional production
  • Dave Kutch – mastering
  • Sebastian Krüger – photography
  • Andrew Stasser – design
  • Beau Thomas – vinyl cut

Charts

Chart (2015) Peak
position
Belgian Albums (Ultratop Flanders)[47] 95
Belgian Albums (Ultratop Wallonia)[48] 199
Japanese Albums (Oricon)[49] 108
UK Record Store Albums (Official Record Store Chart)[50] 19
US Dance/Electronic Albums (Billboard)[51] 2
US Independent Albums (Billboard)[52] 14
US Top Heatseekers Albums (Billboard)[53] 2

References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Skinny interview
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 The Fader
  3. ↑ Stereogum
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Rolling Stone | Hear Oneohtrix Point Never Glitchbanger From First 'Rock' Record
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Pitchfork
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 AllMusic
  10. ↑ The 405
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Fact
  15. ↑ [1]
  16. ↑ Fact
  17. ↑ Stereogum
  18. ↑ Pitchfork
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ PopMatters
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ The Skinny
  36. ↑ Under the Radar
  37. ↑ The Line of Best Fit
  38. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  39. ↑ Dusted Magazine
  40. ↑ Dummy Mag - 30 Best Albums
  41. ↑ Fact. The 50 Best Albums of 2015.
  42. ↑ PopMatters 80 Best Albums
  43. ↑ SPIN
  44. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  45. ↑ The Quietus Albums 2015
  46. ↑ AllMusic
  47. ↑ "Ultratop.be – Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden of Delete" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved November 21, 2015.
  48. ↑ "Ultratop.be – Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden of Delete" (in French). Hung Medien. Retrieved November 21, 2015.
  49. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  50. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  51. ↑ "Oneohtrix Point Never – Chart history" Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums for Oneohtrix Point Never. Retrieved November 30, 2015.
  52. ↑ "Oneohtrix Point Never – Chart history" Billboard Independent Albums for Oneohtrix Point Never. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
  53. ↑ "Oneohtrix Point Never – Chart history" Billboard Top Heatseekers Albums for Oneohtrix Point Never. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
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