They’re building a vault in Norway, deep within an Arctic mountain. The Global Music Vault, as it is known, follows in the footsteps of the Arctic World Archive and Global Seed Vault before it: an attempt, in a precarious world, to do for music what has been done for art and plants, and protect selected pieces from whatever fate awaits the world around it. Kept on silica glass, the most robust means of sonic preservation in the world, these recordings are intended to outlive our grandchildren, and their grandchildren too. It’s an evocative, dramatic enterprise, but one which provokes a very real question: what is to be preserved – and who among us will decide it?
The new album from Oneohtrix Point Never asks a tangential question: what to do with the music that will be, inevitably, one day lost? Ever since the proliferation of the internet, we’ve become accustomed to the idea that everything is forever now. Gigs which Bob Dylan once delivered to a crowd of dozens in a backwater bar in 1961 are now available in £200 sets. But while our living archives grow more expansive, so too are they becoming more fragile than ever, as betrayed by the words we use to describe them. The stream. The cloud. Well, streams dry up. Clouds will, inevitably, part – and what then? Well, the inconceivable. Music which is, simply, gone forever.
Tranquilizer is made, materially, out of such music – an online archive Lopatin stumbled upon during the COVID era which contained 400GB of niche ‘90s sample CDs and muzak ROMplers. He planned to do something with them until, one day, he returned to the bookmarked tab to find it gone. When it resurfaced elsewhere, Lopatin seized the moment, and made this album out of it, feeding a forest of strange sonic detritus through rudimentary sample-browsing software and bouncing around the digital thicket, waiting for moments of magic to occur.
Tranquilizer is Lopatin’s most process-orientated project since 2011 and (fittingly, for music made with a degree of forced spontaneity) the resultant songs carry an ungovernable quality – their exact workings unknowable, presumably, even to their maker. The surface textures, as per their source material, are various shades of synthetic chintz, pushed in directions which are shimmering and vast. In 2025 few artists other than OPN would choose to feature the cheesy, revving synths which appear throughout ‘Modern Lust’, an unlikely name for what sounds like a remix of a DVD loading screen from the Bush era.
Lopatin doesn’t just wring moments of grin-inducing audacity from the archive, though, but a startling degree of emotional range too. Playing the album through is like riding a ghost train, swerving between melancholy quiet (the lonesome piano of ‘Fear of Symmetry’) to moments of sheer, ecstatic joy, like the flurry of dazzling synths which erupt sixty seconds into ‘D.I.S.’. The results are frequently thrilling. ‘Rodl Glide’ may well be the best OPN song in a decade. Where Lopatin’s last sample-heavy record, Replica, located sadness in the motifs of advertising, more often than not Tranquilizer reads like a celebration, a love letter to art which was once vanished and soon, most likely, will be again.
When I interviewed Lopatin earlier this year he told me that “everything is capable of being interesting, that enchantment should be located everywhere, if it exists at all”. More than any other notion, it’s this one which has been the guiding principle of OPN’s career to date. It’s a magic trick he pulls off again on Tranquilizer: sifting through the graveyard of our computers’ dreaming and conjuring something enchanting.
