Author: Christian de Mouilpied Sancto

Forgetting Remains: An essay-review of Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Dropped a day before Halloween, four days before Trump and Biden faced off at the polls, and amid a worldwide uptick in Covid-19 cases, Daniel Lopatin’s ninth studio album as Oneohtrix Point Never landed at a scary moment in this scariest of years. Magic Oneohtrix Point Never was born during lockdown—Lopatin recorded it in his Brooklyn apartment and an Airbnb cabin in Massachusetts, his home state—and although 2020 might have spurred his longstanding interest in dystopia, instead it occasioned introspection and retrospection. “I realised I’d wanted to make an album as a kind of projection of my life; of my life of listening,” he told The Guardian.1 The protagonist in that life of listening is radio. Lopatin’s nom de plume derives from Boston’s Magic 106.7, a soft-rock radio station he grew up listening to, and reuniting his handle with “magic” implies both a consummated homage and an identity statement characteristic of self-titled albums. But in tying his identity statement to radio, Lopatin intertwines his “life of listening” with sonic culture’s broader historical shifts. Throughout Magic, …