Daniel Lopatin returns to face the world, after having locked himself away two years ago in his absurd multiverse with the blinding “Again”. And to do so he gives in to criticism on the most obvious contrasts and excesses of the hyper-capitalist society in which we live. “Tranquilizer” is in fact “a record modeled on commercial audio kits from a bygone era, a cliché index reversed from the inside”, as he himself said. Recent memory can therefore only turn immediately to “Atlas Of Green” by Dialect, an album that electronically fictionalizes this concept. But unlike Andrew PM Hunt, Daniel Lopatin shows greater schizophrenia during the fifteen stages of his journey, alternating ambient stasis and virulent HD scores as he has almost always done.
Having made the appropriate premises on concept upstream of the work, the first sensations are of stupor mixed with mere perdition. Because if on the one hand the start is a one-two in soporific transcendence (“For Residue”, “Bumpy”), between exotic flickerings and docile “rhythmic” changes, “Lifeword” only stages yet another cybernetic jungle to which the Onehotrix Point Never brand has accustomed us since time immemorial.
The five movements at the start flow more or less following this approach, before the piano notes of “Fear Of Symmetry”, jagged in a vapor arrangement, emerge from the plate, thus unleashing a new suggestion that seems to be on par with the blades depicted on the cover, a work entitled “Blue Interval” and painted in 1972 by Abner Hershberger.
In short, less madness and more thoughtfulness. Lopatin, however, does not operate by subtraction, on the contrary he increases the dose, without overdoing it or plunging headlong into his proverbial mess. Thus emerges a semi-flat calm that is striking, net of some excessively “Tibetan” or, without beating around the bush too much, damned new age passages, lined up almost as if Lopatin wanted to take back into his hands the harmonic constructs of masters like Gershon Kingsley or the unfathomable spirituality of Michel Uyttebroek (“Bell Scanner”).
Of course, behind this luminous escape from the planet's bad habits there also stand out moments less aligned with the motive, such as the esoteric “DIS”, lost as it is inside glitches telephone and unspecified sketch cinematographic. An episode that could also have been thought of as a potential soundtrack for a film that narrates an already planned future. It is no coincidence, in fact, that in the meantime the New York composer has edited the music for “Marty Supreme”, the new film by Josh Safdie with Timothée Chalamet, due out in the United States at Christmas.
“Tranquilizer” is obviously the summa of the disc's ambitions exposed above, while the flashes in field recording of “Storm Show” nourish the propensity for third worldism inherent in the soul of the New York composer. Some electro bizarreness then appears supreme in the queue, see “Rodl Glide”, but it's just a splash of lava on a mostly white canvas.
With “Tranquilizer” Lopatin imagines his Pandora. Flying above it without asking too many questions could be, despite a few gray areas, revealing in its own way. A record that in some ways also links with appropriate mastery the visionary approach of “Age Of” and the inexplicable confusion of “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never”, confirming the sartorial skills of one of the greatest electronic talents of the New Millennium.
22/11/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
