Oneohtrix Point Never "Again" [Blue Vinyl] 2LP

"Again is Oneohtrix Point Never's tenth studio album. It is, as Daniel Lopatin says, part of 'a speculative autobiography,' or a continued idea: a sort of sequel to Garden of Delete’s expansive, layer-cake lore, though shorn of conceptual weight. It’s a vision of OPN, raw and uncut. If previous albums explored a crescendo in his life – a way to think through for the alienation of teenhood, and all the private glory of first making contact with music as a magical act – they crested the zenith of the Oneohtrix myth. Again is a further attempt to collaborate with the younger version of himself, to plumb a version of his young adulthood that wasn't making all of this music necessarily, but perhaps would’ve. The appropriately-titled 'Memories of Music' is nothing like post-rock, but it memorialises its ideas: it’s a baroque masterwork of finely tooled sound, giving us a space in which time moves neither left or right, nor up and down, but everywhere – pausing it, freezing it, and lingering in the what-ifs that it ceaselessly offers. What if, for instance, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo performed on the track? And what if Jim O’Rourke’s capacious talent was deployed on the album as well? What if we had Xiu Xiu, and Robert Ames of the London Contemporary Orchestra waving his baton at the NOMAD Ensemble to re-create the orchestral arrangement of 'Elsewhere?' What if OPN’s stew of AI saliva-spray, guttural gibberish, prog rock, off-speed kosmische, sundry crescendocore, ambient glitch, and dustbin soundtracks was mixed in modes of nostalgia, or something like it?" - Warp Records