Pitchfork's Soundplay Game Jam: Chromatics, DJ set by Oneohtrix Point Never
New Museum
Wednesday, September 5

Better than: The day before Fashion Week.

When I arrived at the New Museum for Pitchfork's Soundplay Game Jam, the first person I recognized was Daniel Lopatin. Not as random as the first person I held a conversation with, who was named Viking Swan and seemed to have wandered in from CBGB Festival a few months ago. With those duly noted and my mind wiped clean of expectations (what to expect, after all, from a "game jam"), I moved through a pleasantly packed crowd of B-list would-be models who might have appeared in a GQ spread to accomplish the real goal at my first Chromatics show: play video games.

Video games are a thing again—at least, if you don't count the many people for whom it has always been a thing—and Pitchfork has fallen headfirst into the market alongside The National, Beck, HEALTH, and other artists featured on its pages with Soundplay, a showcase of games inspired by songs.

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Glenn Branca plays Yo Eskerrik Asko, NYC! tonight.

The rite of the music festival usually involves conglomerate domination and sponsorship whoring—but this weekend's genre-encompassing Yo Eskerrik Asko, NYC! is a refreshing break from that norm. Organizer Don Mclean of the DIY-minded Fortissimo Records and improv noise ensemble Action Beat candidly admits to shelling out a shit-ton of his money to put together this weekend's mindblowing lineups.

In addition to composer, symphonist and no wave visionary Glenn Branca and his ensemble (who will perform The Ascension: The Sequel), electronics-destroying noise miscreants White Suns and sound collage artists Oneohtrix Point Never and Tim Hecker, tomorrow night marks the much-welcomed return of guitarist Tom Carter, who fell ill on tour in Germany. Carter will be playing alongside ex-wife Christina Carter in spiritual guitar duo Charalambides.

Sound of the City got to chat via email with Mclean about putting out Branca's 1981 no wave landmark The Ascension (on vinyl), Action Beat and the festival's lineup.

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via Red Bull Music Academy

Oneohtrix Point Never
The Studio At Webster Hall
Tuesday, March 6

Better than: Being in an actual coma, I suppose.

There were only twenty or so people left standing in Webster Hall's basement at the end Oneohtrix Point Never's performance last night. The majority of the audience had slowly trickled out not too long into Daniel Lopatin's computerized solo set for Red Bull Music Academy, which came on the heels of a brief lecture. It wasn't exactly his fault; the producer's sprawling, noise-laden cinematics aren't really made for group consumption.

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Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

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Oneohtrix Point Never.

CMJ Day Two: Oneohtrix Point Never, Deradoorian

Better than: Standing outside in the rain with those turned away.

Catching a quick intra-Williasmburg cab from Bedford and North 7th down to 285 Kent, I made the usual small talk with the driver, asking how the now pouring rain would affect business. The answer, essentially, was that the weather helped when suckers like me forgot their umbrellas and has somewhere to be, hurt because less people wanted to go anywhere. I should have told him to stick to the rock clubs: Even at nine o'clock the sidewalk outside my destination and the neighboring Glasslands Gallery had turned into something of a cab depot, those looking to hop over to a new venue intermingled with those trying to get a few puffs out of their cigarettes before the rain extinguished them.

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One-man haunted house Oneohtrix Point Never has been bleeping on the Yes In My Backyard radar since his two-disc escape-from-sanity synth meditation Rifts dropped in 2009, leaving a bloody trail of John Carpenter zone-outs and Tangerine Nightmares. In the two years since, he's been a leading light of altered analog abuse—invited by Animal Collective to play ATP, collaborating with Antony on a remix, and pulling in a critically adored side hustle as a member of nostalgiawave duo Ford & Lopatin. His third OPN CD release, Replica, is easily his most fleshed-out and alive, trading his floaty abysses for an action-packed venom fog: squelchy like Eric Copeland, noisy like Fennesz, and broiling with chattering "ghost vocals" recontextualized from compilations of advertisements scored from Videomercials, an online company that sells tapes of old TV shows minus the shows. The results are an uneasy marriage between a bad VHS dub of an Italian horror flick and a warped jazz fusion record thrifted from the Salvation Army. Below, download the title track, a mix of Satie pianos gently oozing alongside humming, buzzing synth collisions.

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"The most exciting tunes are forays into completely new zones," wrote Simon Reynolds in last month's Voice profile of Daniel Lopatin, a/k/a Brooklyn noise/drone/ambient/experimental wunderkind Oneohtrix Point Never, whose new full-length, Returnal, is one of the year's best. Courtesy Pitchfork, here we have an entirely unrecognizable piano + Antony remix of the title track, frail and devastating as per usual. Resonant line: "Internet is a self-atomizing machine." Especially in August.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Oneohtrix Point Never photo by Nate Dorr

Brooklyn uneasy dreamer Daniel Lopatin, a/k/a Oneohtrix Point Never, is an electronics mutilator of the most sensitive variety. His analog slurry has the dark, foreboding exterior of the New York's noise scene, but its darkest-space analog keyboard pulse actually puts Lopatin's music much closer to Hawkwind's cosmic prog, Manuel Gottsching's minimal grid systems, or Tangerine Dream's art-drone. The two-disc anthology Rifts, released today on No Fun Records, combines the three full-length records OPN released between 2007 and 2009. Rather than employing the charred, hyper-distorted pedal chain noise of his peers, Lopatin uses a tender, gentle touch. You can hear every key he presses on his keyboards; the result is a gentle mush-hum of accidental chillwave, Reznor-styled churn, a whole lot of Italo-prog, and even some loving drones reminiscent of Lopatin's other project, Infinity Window. "Zones Without People," the title track to a piece of vinyl released on Brooklyn's Arbor Records and properly anthologized on Rifts, is a four-minute autobahn ride that combines the creepy menace of a John Carpenter soundtrack with a vague approximation of an Ibiza-ready synth-house banger--well, minus the beat, of course.

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