If you’re a fan of ambient and complex electronic music, the kind that continuously surprises and intrigues you, then Garden of Delete, the new album from Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin), should be one of your must-have albums of the year. Each track is a dizzying and spellbinding journey of analog and electronic wizardry, ultimately creating an album that feels like cyber journey that is a reflection of our own past, present, and future, all rolled into one package. However, it will take multiple listens to fully unwrap the stunning and breathtaking beauty that this album has to offer. If you can’t tell by now, I absolutely love this album.
To celebrate tomorrow’s release of Garden of Delete, we got Daniel and his friend The Sewer System to pick apart the album, taking each song and comparing them to horror movies. The end result is a fascinating look into the mind of Lopatin as his envisions each song being a part of or a representation of something very familiar to us.
Of course, this is meant to tease you as the majority of these tracks aren’t out yet for you to hear. However, if this intrigues you enough, and hopefully it will, then you should absolutely pre-order a copy.
Intro – Creep Show (Intro)
In all fairness we chose another intro for this one – the pitch perfect opener to Creep Show. Low-rent suburban horror, evil influence invading the home from the outside, sadistic laughter…
Real old dad with Leslie Nielsen-esque hair… “That’s why God made fathers”… Tom Savini as garbage man… A demonically sadistic preteen willing to inflict mortal pain upon his father for being a dick and throwing out his trashy comic book. This one could probably cover most of the major concepts in G.O.D. honestly.
Ezra – Nowhere
The films of Gregg Araki may not be classified as horror, but they have been known to horrify viewers. Nowhere fits this track and the personage of “Ezra” like a glove. An otherworldly embodied teen, bioconfused and navigating the space of drugs, sex, faith and alienation… ultimately an ode to doom and loneliness (with suicide, murder, valley-girl-incinerating reptiloids, exploding co-eds, and John Ritter as a demonic televangelist).
ECCOJAMC1 – Dead Ringers
The first Cronenberg entry on our list. Dead Ringers is the story of symbiotically/parasitically linked twin gynecologists. “Eccojamc1” is mirrored in the psychological stalemate of the Brothers Beverly – the weak twin echoing the strong, one dissecting the other to know what is inside them… to know what is inside himself… following solipsistic reasoning to a sickly place… custom tools for operating on mutants… “I need something to slow everything down…”
Sticky Drama – 3-way tie: The Fly, Tetsuo, Videodrome
More heavy Cronenberg correlations here, as “Sticky Drama” is essentially a meditation on body horror and unsafe libidinal obsession. Our choice ended up being a deadlock between The Fly, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Videodrome. A mash up of scenes from those films would be a perfect thematic and visual compliment to this track. Goldblum creeping on Gina Davis // James Woods losing his shit over Debby Harry… Tetsuo fucking shit up in a cyber rage and taking on tech components like a nightmarish game of Katamari Damacy… Brundlefly puking on donuts intermittently throughout… Finally Woods blasting himself in the head with his organic handgun full of New Flesh apotheosis.
SDFK – Audition (Runner-up Silence of the Lambs)
The arc of Audition matches the sonics of “SDFK”. Counteracting the quiet routine melancholia and humiliation of quotidian life through ritualistic trap building. The slow, sedate, methodical repetition of a claustrophobic plan… ressentiment for all the imposing sad fucks in the world… a small design with nothing but horrible intent. Calm expectation from which violence explodes suddenly and ends just as suddenly. Runner-up goes to Silence of the Lambs because the endless industrial rhythm just sounds like something Jame Gumb would be into.
Mutant Standard – Altered States
Dancing in the Dreamtime, Edwardian pleasure tasters, pythons & komodo dragons, a return to dust thru status and slow nuclear extinction, cosmic microrelevance. Pick a hallucination sequence from Altered States and it will pretty much work with this track. The first time I tried to watch this flick I fell asleep only to wake up during the insane final trip scene. It took me a couple of minutes before I was convinced I was in the right dimension.
Child of Rage – Child of Rage (Runners-up Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, The Boogeyman (1980), The Reflecting Skin)
“Child of Rage” is eponymously titled for a made-for-TV movie and its source documentary; neither of which are particularly different from each other… both seem to exploit and vilify Beth Thomas, the subject of the documentary who having been abused as a child developed reactive attachment disorder… causing her to lash out and threaten her family with seething rage. I wanted to make a piece of music that characterized the tragedy that is having your disorder documented for other people’s pleasure/education or whatever. Beth Thomas is now an adult… a registered nurse and advocate for reactive attachment disorder who has most likely put these pointless films behind her… sadly, most of us who know her as a creepy imp will never think of her as anything but that. We chose a few runners-up that resonated thematically with “Child of Rage”; Halloween 3 gives us societal evil subjecting children to cosmic/televisual manipulation transforming and destroying them individually in the comfort of their own homes (no unstoppable slasher necessary here); The Boogeyman presents a very unhealthy brother sister relationship that stems from witnessing some really bad shit at a too-young age; The Reflecting Skin is a phantasmagoric oddity that portrays childhood escapism amidst the banality and isolation of Iowa… ah, the nightmare of childhood…
Animals – Tie: Wolfen & The Thing
“Animals” was a tough track to match. It has such an overt sci-fi apocalyptic feel and it’s hard not to think about scenes of Judgement Day from T2 or the millennial hysteria of Strange Days. We ended in a tie, with each entry providing its own special ingredient to compliment the doomsday sound. Wolfen’s truly desolate locations filmed in South Bronx in 1980 are incredible, and the film deserves a pretty sweet genre footnote as it introduced an early predecessor to the well known “Predator-vision” of the Schwarzenegger, et. al films. The Thing is John Carpenter’s vision of desolation, paranoia, and lurking death without resolution. The Thing was the first film of Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’, a set of films loosely connected by the idea that the evil and madness in the world can not be stemmed off or contained. A pyrrhic victory is the best Russel’s MacReady can score against the faceless recombinant specter of death, while we’re left as spectators to his doubt and fatalism at humanity’s twilight.
I Bite Through It – Zombi 2 (Runner-up: Maniac)
Cannibalism is a tried and true topic for horror, so it was not hard to find candidates to represent “I Bite Through It”. Although there is an entire sub-genre of exploitation flicks that are dedicated to flesh eating atrocity, and some amazing dinner scenes in horror (Sally at the dinner table in Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes to mind), we looked for a film that lingered on the distress and terror of tearing through viscera. The realistic violence in Maniac is exceedingly visceral and upsetting, with a slow stabbing sequence that is difficult to watch first and foremost because it makes you feel the blade of the killer’s knife sliding through your own torso. Even so, our first choice is Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, simply because it has one of the most damaging flesh gouging scenes in film history. Specifically enucleation… in the most horrible fucking way imaginable…
Freaky Eyes – Tie: Se7en & Donnie Darko
‘The freaky eyes had the whole plan / I have no head’… “Freaky Eyes” is a funeral toll… a meeting with doom. It’s the terrible epiphany of accepting that the end has already occurred and you are perceiving only the after effects and epiphenomena of loss. This ended up being a tie between Se7en and Donnie Darko because both films capture the tragedy of a protagonist manipulated by madness beyond their own scale and full comprehension (John Doe and “Frank”). The final turn for both Donnie and Det. Mills comes at a point of transformation, catching up with the horror of their own predicament and becoming it/nothing.
The meeting scenes between Donnie and “Frank” bring us a familiar take on haunting premonitions, bearing some resemblance to the nagging ghosts of dead victims in An American Werewolf in London, but they are couched in the insecurity and anxiety of teen crisis and over-medicated mental collapse. While the culminating scene of Se7en mirrors the dread of Freaky Eyes in its pacing, grim color, and quietude… One of the great touches of this scene is John Doe’s own epiphany. His machinations are so sinister, cabalistic, and timely that he ends up surprising himself… “Oh, he didn’t know?”
Special mention goes to every paperback horror novel with an otherwise normal human figure embossed on the cover with eyes that have been animalized/demonized… good way to convey a possession scenario for $3.99 US / $4.99 CAN.
Lift – Natural Born Killers (Honorable mention: Kalifornia)
Folie à deux… intense fixation between lovers that allows for delusion and unimagined peril to blossom… The lyrics to “Lift” roughly characterize the following real life scenario: you go to a party and you’re supposed to meet your significant other there. You show up first and thus you feel alone even though you’re in a room full of people… strangers? Yes, because everyone is a stranger except for the person you love… and that’s the problem of co-dependency. Natural Born Killers is more than a meditation on fast-food cultural violence and shock value commoditized for sensational gossip news. At its heart it is a desperate love story. The mania and psychic need that is looped and amplified between Mickey and Mallory finds its echoes in minor characters… Tom Sizemore’s perversely obsessed Det. Scagnetti shows us just how much work it takes to strangle someone, while Robert Downey, Jr.’s Wayne Gale shows us that a monofixated sociopath isn’t necessarily cut out for the major leagues of our star-crossed stranger killers. An infernal road movie that focuses more on the spiritual terrain of multistate killing sprees and meanwhile uncovers deep emotional catharses for its characters while racking up a considerable death count… on second thought… co-dependency sounds fun. Another lurid road movie we had to mention, but which unfortunately ends up being the perennial ‘kid brother’ to NBK is Kalifornia. We love this movie. Fuck you.
No Good – X-Files: Millenium (Season 7, Episode 4)
“No Good” is in our minds a stoner metal country ballad about accepting your own evil. The whole thing of leaving town… One of a handful of X-Files episodes to cover the living dead, and by far the most in line with Romero’s vision of zombies, was season seven’s Millennium. A cabal of CEO white guys decide they’re willing to zombify themselves in order to become the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, letting the rest of us to deal with the ensuing millennial rapture. Having never seen the television series Millenium, this was an interesting episode to watch on its own and felt like standard monster of the week format with a fast build up and a lot at stake. Lance Henriksen brings a considerable amount of gravitas to the episode and we are happy he make it on our list here as well… Mulder and Scully ring in 2000 the best way they know how…
Oneohtrix Point Never online:
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Tour dates:
Nov 20 Villain New York, NY
Nov 23 Venue Vancouver, Canada
Nov 24 Neumos Seattle, WA
Nov 25 Doug Fir Lounge Portland, OR
Nov 27 The Independent San Francisco, CA
Nov 28 Echoplex Los Angeles, CA
Dec 03 Liquidroom Ebisu, Japan
Dec 04 FUNJ-TWICE Osaka, Japan
Feb 18, 2016 Harpa Reykjavík, Iceland
Feb 24, 2016 Heaven London, United Kingdom
