A decade and a half ago, Daniel Lopatin shelled out what might be the best hundred bucks he ever spent. On the internet, he’d come across a guy selling bootleg DVD compilations of decades-old TV commercials culled from Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime soaps, and late-night cable: Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Hershey’s chocolate bars, Heinz Alphagetti. Dated, kitschy stuff, thick with chintzy synths and VHS buzz. For someone like Lopatin, obsessed with the cultural detritus of the late 20th century, this was manna. He snapped up a handful of discs, ripped the audio without so much as watching them, and loaded the choicest bits into his sampler. The results became Replica, a tangled suite of ambient-expressionist fugues—ethereal, elegiac, unsettling—that constitutes one of the finest pieces of electronic music of the new millennium.
The origins of Tranquilizer, Lopatin’s new album under his Oneohtrix Point Never alias, are strikingly similar. This time, it’s rooted in a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin found on the Internet Archive in the early 2020s. He bookmarked the page with the vague intention of using them in a future project; then they disappeared, presumed casualties of a DMCA takedown notice, and he moved on. When the files unexpectedly turned up again, the archive’s very impermanence became a newfound part of its appeal. “It occurred to me that even that—the disappearing and resurfacing—was something I wanted to capture,” he said. “I wanted to capture the emotional register of an era where everything is archived but perpetually slipping away.”
This isn’t new territory for Lopatin. His 2020 album Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, which was rooted in another audio archive he discovered online, took as its central conceit the “format flips” that occur when radio stations change from, say, golden oldies to commercial country. He framed 2023’s Again as a conversation between his contemporary and younger selves, as a way of interrogating the slipperiness of taste and memory. But Tranquilizer feels less explicitly conceptual than either of those albums (to say nothing of the esoteric Age Of or the abrasive Garden of Delete, with its elaborate origin story about humanoid aliens and a made-up “hypergrunge” band, complete with backdated blog posts, fictional Twitter accounts, and other assorted digital marginalia).
