Oneohtrix Point Never, a.k.a. producer Daniel Lopatin, recently announced a new album titled Age Of, and he’s just released a first song, “Black Snow,” along with a self-directed video. It’s an unusual and counterintuitively pop-oriented track, incorporating noisy scrapes, fragments of neo-Renaissance melodies, smoky distortion, and negative space beneath heavily filtered but still recognizably human vocals.
According to Lopatin, inspiration for the song came from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a ’90s philosophical collective whose members engaged ideas about futurism, technology, science fiction, and the occult. “Black Snow” also makes use of a daxophone, a Star Trek-looking stringed instrument invented by the late avant-garde guitarist Hans Reichel in 1987, and the song’s video closes with an acknowledgment of Harmony Korine’s 1999 film Julien Donkey-Boy.
Age Of is out June 1 from Warp, just after Myriad, an upcoming series of 0PN multimedia installation performances in New York City and London. We already heard a little bit of new music in the event trailer, but “Black Snow” is the first song from the new album to be released in full. Listen below, and don’t miss Lopatin’s idiosyncratic video, which expands on an emerging vision of warped cybernetics and absurdist, internally referential anachronism—during one retro-futuristic still life scene, you’ll notice a computer screen that appears to be playing part of the earlier Myriad trailer.
