Oneohtrix Point Never

EO

What originally got you into music?

OPN

My instinct is to say that it was the mystery of how on earth the sounds I heard on the radio were put together: how music was synchronized, how sounds layered with other sounds, how all of these beautiful things happened. Those were some of life’s great mysteries. Now I know all that stuff, and the mystery is shattered. [Laughs.]

EO

The mystery is gone.

OPN

It’s very sad when you figure out how things work. Music was this wonderful escape for me but I probably knew more about how movies were made because of my interests growing up. I wanted to make movies really bad. I fancied myself a screenwriter and I wanted to be in and around filmmaking and filmmakers. My friends voraciously watched movies. The first significant art project that I was ever involved in was making a little movie. I made it with two friends and edited it with two VCRs. My first time ever editing sound was for the project because there was sound in the picture. Still, I didn’t particularly think of myself as somebody that wanted to pursue any kind of meaningful career in music. I was a music fan and dubbing tapes and making mixes—stuff like that.

EO

Do you think that you use music to tell visual stories?

OPN

Oh, yeah. I think about this all the time. Somebody sent me a piece of music the other day; the title of the record was See with Your Ears. I loved it so much, this weird little 1970s record. I also think the inverse of the title is true, like, “Hear with your eyes.” That’s what my music seems like. That’s a practice that’s interesting to me.

EO

Yeah, “Hear with your eyes” sounds like you.

OPN

Exactly. I really do believe that concept is so central to my creative process and my understanding of emotionality. I have a suspicion that minor melodicism (music in a minor key) may have emerged from a primordial encounter between an early man and an animal that was being hunted or suffering. You can imagine the gasps and the moans of this hunted or maimed animal, like… [Vocalization.] This sound, this melismatic thing, this downward curving portamento, a gasp—that to me is the birth of minor melodicism. That’s not just the expression of agony as we know it, but also the beginning of wanting to express things that sound like that. The image of the animal is linked to the sound of the animal. You see it suffering, you hear it suffering, and a connection is made. I can’t disconnect those images from the sounds.

EO

It’s like you’re thinking beyond the constraints of spoken language to deal with the concept of language, or even the origin of language, in your work.

OPN

I’m trying. I try to be honest about what I’m experiencing way down deep and play with the images that are invoked. My tool is music—in particular, computer music and the keyboard. I have a lot of fun connecting the medium of my unconscious to the medium of technology and seeing what happens.

EO

That reminds me of the people who do sound effects for movies. They’re making sounds that represent the image, not sounds that convey the feeling of the image.

OPN

Yeah, but I don’t need to do any kind of representation. I’m not a foley artist so I’m free of that responsibility. For me, my only responsibility is to my psyche. If a certain sound emerges that I find interesting, I just tend to listen to it deeply and question what it is.

EO

What do you mean by deeply? Repeatedly? Attentively? Both?

OPN

Yeah, maybe I’ll come back to it. Something draws you to it. There’s some kind of electricity or fire that causes you to think, “Oh, hey, I want to play around with this for a while. I want to listen to this and see what happens when I move around the stereo field this way, that way, up, down, left, right, whatever.” You’re playing around, you’re like a kid, and you’re kind of obsessed. Some people don’t want to know why they’re drawn to a particular sound. Playing is enough for them. They’re like, “Okay, I like this, now let’s make music from it.” But for me, it helps to know why I’m drawn to a sound, to name the thing, and to understand what the image of that sound is. It’s not about that bullshit where you see colors in words and stuff.

EO

Synesthesia?

OPN

Right, I think it’s bullshit. I can’t really imagine particular frequencies having deeply discrete links to color. I mean, maybe it’s true, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about...

EO

Scores, a form of scoring. There’s something so essayistic and cinematic about the music you create.

OPN

It’s an amusement park ride. It’s doing certain things at certain times. It’s conveying a certain kind of feeling, and deciding how much I want to expound on that feeling or not at any moment. It’s up to me. I have a highly imagistic relationship to the sound. When I create music, I’m basically working from, or towards, a sequence of highly charged image-like experiences I’ve had with interesting sounds and melodies.

EO

I’ve read about so many musicians who keep TVs in their studio to watch as they’re making music. Do you take in visual cues and then create scores for what you’ve seen?

OPN

No, no, I don’t let images direct me. I can’t rationalize what I do after the fact either. For me, a sound or a texture or a melody will emerge, and then it will generate an idea, like the concept or thesis of the song. I often go from abstraction to an archetypal, fully charged conceptor image and then back to the abstraction, and back to the image until I’m done. Then you’re like, “Oh, fuck, now I have to do a bunch of interviews now about it.”

But to return to what you mentioned about my music being cinematic, that was not necessarily something that occurred to me until the first time I was sitting with the Safdie brothers and they asked me if we could do a film together. Benny or Josh was like, “Your music sounds like a score to a film.” I said, “No, it doesn’t, because scores don’t sound like that. My music sounds like a film that’s never been made.” It’s too dense and too specific to function as a score.

EO

It’s like listening to a book on tape.

OPN

Yeah. I said, “I beg to disagree about the music being like an imaginary score, because I’m not thinking about scores.” I’m trying to make a movie, but all I have...

EO

…is music.

OPN

Yes, I’m making a movie with music. I don’t have the expertise or talent to make movies. I just use the materials at my disposal.

EO

Your palettes, sounds, and structures are like characters.

OPN

Yes, 100%. And you can often deliberate whether they’re good or interesting characters, or what they even are.

EO

It’s interesting, some of your albums feel like television shows and others feel like movies.

OPN

Yeah, definitely. I don’t expect anybody to figure this shit out—just have fun with it, whatever. But I’m just telling you how the sausage is made.

EO

What’s your relationship to writing? How much do words matter to your melodies?

OPN

Words show up a few different ways in my work. Sometimes they matter, sometimes they don’t. For instance, with Again I had this idea that when there were lyrics, they should operate in just an expository capacity at the very beginning of the song. It’s like when you hear a narration right before you launch into a scene, and then never again until the next time the narrator pops up. I thought it would be interesting to use lyrics that way, like, “Here’s a few things I wanted to tell you to set the mood,” and then—bam—song. And then no more words. But there’s songs on Magic, which has nothing truly radical about it, during which the lyrics function like they do…

EO

…in a pop song.

OPN

Yeah, just music. Just a song that plods along.

EO

It’s lyrical but really polished. I was reading that you created an entire mythology behind Garden of Delete.

OPN

Well, that album uses a foreign form language as a medium for setting the mood.

EO

In Magic the lyrics plods along, but you can feel the sentimentality. It’s really bouncy and elastic, very orchestral.

OPN

Yeah, it is bouncy and elastic. It’s very flowery.

EO

It’s optimistic.

OPN

It is. It sounds like Teletubbies or something. It’s very childlike, Magic.

EO

It sounds like Show and Tell, like you’re pointing at things for the listener: “Oh, my God, look at this thing over here, look at this thing over there.”

OPN

It’s a child being like, “Mommy, what’s that?”

EO

I do want to talk about the way you approach your work. It seems like you take a rigorously conceptual approach. Was that always the case?

OPN

No, it wasn’t there in the beginning, I think I’ve grown into myself over the years. I hear certain idiosyncrasies in the earliest stuff I ever recorded that are unshakeable, but as far as approaching things in a more or less conceptual, a sort of imagistic, archetypal manner: I wanted to back then, but I didn’t have the fluidity as a producer to back up the images, or to create a bounty of interesting sounds from scratch. I was just figuring how to even make music, you know?

It’s like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. It’s his first movie, he made it with a grant the AFI gave him in 1973. In 1977, he put out this movie, elements of which somehow become embedded in his entire lexicon. Everything is already there and in place, and then we see him improve. I don’t know if that’s necessarily my story. My first records are basically imitative. I made them by looking at my heroes and trying to copy them while also asking myself, “How do I do my thing?” Those early records sound like very strange, protracted paintings to me. They’re very spacious and off. I like them, but I didn’t want to make paintings. I wanted to make movies.

EO

How did you meet Carlos Giffoni? Was he instrumental during the early years of your career?

OPN

Without Carlos there’s nothing. He took a big chance on me, because I was embedded in the experimental music scene in Boston and he was in New York. He had a record label called No Fun. It wasn’t big, but it was a meaningful platform for people that were in the noise scene. To be able to perform in No Fun meant that you had some level of cache. There was a message board called “I-Heart Tronic,” or “I Hate Noise,” or “I Love Noise,” I don’t know, where people gossiped about music and these small batch releases. Anyways, I’m in Boston, and I’m doing my thing, and I got his attention by messaging him on the message board. I said, “Here’s this tape that I’ve put out through my friend from Cleveland’s little label. I would want nothing more than to be able to perform this music at No Fun.”

EO

What was your friend’s label called?

OPN

Deception Island.

EO

Fitting. [Laughs.]

OPN

On Deception Island we’d put out, I don’t know, 50 or 100 tapes. The tape I sent Carlos was called Betrayed in the Octagon (2007). He wrote me back and he goes, “Not enough people know about this tape. Why don’t we put it out again, but on vinyl, under No Fun?” That was really, really important because suddenly I had this guy that people respected vouching for me.

But also, No Fun was very polarizing. The noise scene was very stratified and had stupid rules. It almost seemed like you had to wear a black shirt and be macho in one way or another. The music, meanwhile, had to be kind of aggressive. Everything about it was so sexless and so weird. I did not find it to be a scene that I wanted to embed myself in. It presented itself as a kind of men’s club. The noise was a male scream. Hellacious stuff. I was very drawn to certain aspects of it, some of the music was sculptural and beautiful.

EO

It can be like painting or sculpting with sound.

OPN

Yes, I dug that so much. But the social part felt so boring and restrictive. I can’t describe it in any way other than that it lacked sensuality.

EO

And your music is so pretty.

OPN

Exactly. My music is pretty, and it split people at this No Fun label. It didn’t sound like all the other shit going around.

EO

It’s seductive, but also strange.

OPN

There’s force to it, but it’s a gentle force. Long story short, pairing my music with Carlos’s label worked. People were buying the record. Some people might have complained about it, but there were a lot who said that it was interesting and good. I started putting out more music with Carlos and continuing to put out lesser works of mine on my friend’s label. I was producing a lot of music at the time.

EO

How old were you when Deception Island was rereleased?

OPN

25. I had put out a few things before that I had recorded in college at Hampshire, but nothing of any significance. I kept putting stuff out and suddenly I began to sell more and more records. Returnal, which I recordedin 2010, contains pretty much everything I thought I could possibly achieve within that early style of music I was involved in. I just dumped everything I could into that one. That was me being like, “All right, here’s some fresh material that’s a definitive picture of where I’m at.” That record came out on Editions Mego, which is a terrific label that I had appreciated a lot as a young musician. It was the first full circle moment for me. I had studied everything they were putting out; they were further away from this harsh, D.I.Y. noise stuff, and more into this refined, European glitch music. They were doing electroacoustic, experimental music with some history to it. But anyway, I’m on Mego, working on Returnal, and wanted to infuse everything that I did with this reaction to the history of that label, my understanding of what made it special. I wanted to take a stab at making a Mego record. I didn’t want to make just an OPN record, but also a Mego record.

EO

You took the opportunity to inhabit both worlds.

OPN

I felt that I was essentially looking at the history of this thing and saying, “Now, I’m going to don this mask,” and it’s going to come out like me anyway. I’m always trying to use all the parts of the buffalo. I remember being in elementary school and learning about Native Americans’ relationship to buffalo. When they hunt and kill one, they use everything and don’t waste anything. To me, when I’m on a label, I don’t want to feign like I’m some unbelievably cool, unique composer who doesn’t give a shit about anything going on around him. I never understood that kind of attitude, I always felt it was so arrogant. I’m always looking around and being like, “What is the context?”

EO

You have to understand the context in order to shape it. I’ve never understood people who solely operate from a place of ego.

OPN

100%. I also think that if you test those people a bit, if you ask them where they come from, or about their story, or who their people are, they don’t know. That’s why they say stuff like, “I’m not like anybody else, I’m a total alien, blah blah blah, I’m completely unique and new.” It’s because they don’t know their history. They haven’t read and listened to the things.

EO

They haven’t done their homework…

OPN

…and thus, they need to rationalize everything. To me, that modernist sentiment (“I’m just this cool mysterious force that came out of nowhere…”) didn’t, and doesn’t, make any sense to me.

EO

Yeah. I mean, it’s also a form of gatekeeping. It’s cheap and lazy.

OPN

It is.

EO

It also frustrates me when people’s work is derivative of a thing, not just an homage to it, and they choose not to cite their sources.

OPN

I completely concur. After Returnal I switched labels. I had a moment in my career when I had the pick of the litter—a bunch of the labels wanted to sign me.

EO

You were 28 years old?

OPN

Yeah. All the deals were bad, though. They might’ve liked me, but when I actually looked at the fine print, I noticed the deals were tragic. The one that presented the best opportunity to me was the one that was called Mexican Summer. Not only were they cool, but they had a real studio in my neighborhood, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. That was something I never had access to before. I asked, “Can I have my own little corner here? Can I have an imprint? Can I learn the tools of the trade?” In my mind, I wanted to become a sophisticated producer. I didn’t want to just keep making the same old record over and over again.

I also wanted to work collaboratively with other people. Mexican Summer was very supportive of that. They were basically like, “Yeah, come on in and set up shop.” And so I created this little imprint called Software. I would walk down to the studio every morning, get my coffee and smoke my cigarette, and then just sit there and try to learn what was going on upstairs at the label and downstairs in the studio. I had to give them a Oneohtrix Point Never record, so I made Replica (2011). That is when I really started getting my act together.

EO

In what sense?

OPN

I went into the album with a strong idea that I didn’t know exactly how I was going to execute. Up until Replica, I was just pushing myself to make better sounding records, but I wasn’t pushing myself conceptually. There was no rhyme or reason other than, “Hey, let’s react in an interesting way to this condition or circumstance.” But with Replica, I’m like, “I know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I know that I will.”

EO

It’s like Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. He’d take a found object, modify it, reposition it, and it’s art.

OPN

Exactly. This is when my readymade thing starts congealing. The world started to seem more and more like a gigantic, audible readymade that I could manipulate and play with. I became more and more interested in my childhood memories of garbage sound, too. In 2012 or 2013 I left Mexican Summer to sign with Warp. I figured out with Replica that I was interested in making conceptually rigorous electronic music records. And that’s what R Plus Seven (2013) is.

EO

Okay, so you leave Mexican Summer, you’re at Warp, and...

OPN

I got further and further into my obsession with sculpture and musical abstraction, or music as experienced in a sort of dilated time experience. R Plus Seven is really melodic, but nothing is working quite like it’s supposed to. The clocks don’t work the same way there.

EO

What do you mean by that?

OPN

The metronome is ticking oddly, the amount of time I’m giving to certain motifs or certain themes are out of sync with what one might expect. Whatever I’m doing, I’m always trying to stretch. I’m trying to manipulate the song structure so that you’re getting a song, but you’re getting it in a way that you might experience a sculpture that requires you to walk around it to grasp it in full. I wanted the listener to feel like they were just hanging around an object of music as opposed to experiencing it as a left-to-right thing with verses, A sections, and B sections, and things like that. I’m really interested in thinking about music now as a gyroscopic thing, like a 3D thing that I interrogate from all these different angles. I was asking myself, “What else can I do with song form while still retaining the feeling and the spirit of song? I didn’t want pure abstraction as a composer. I wanted to make nice music that people wanted to listen to while still rendering the listener’s experience of time to be very strange and uncomfortable.

In 2013 and 2014 I went on tour opening up for Sigur Rós and Nine Inch Nails. Suddenly I thought, “What the fuck is going on?” I’m hanging out with Sigur Rós, Soundgarden, and Nine Inch Nails, my music is becoming more popular, and I’m being exposed to all these different modalities of the music industry.

EO

Modalities?

OPN

Going from playing a show at The Low End Theory, this electronic music night at The Airliner to hanging out with Trent Reznor on tour and then going to London to hang out with these really interesting composers and entertainment people. Worlds were colliding.

EO

How old were you? When was this?

OPN

Like 2014, I’m 32 years old. I was having the time of my life, meeting a lot of people, and absorbing cool shit. Hanging out with Sigur Rós and Nine Inch Nails on that tour made me nostalgic. That’s why I think I made a trilogy of records dealing with my memories, my memories of having music thrust on me, you know? I also wanted to make a record that was kind of a a grunge speculation, like science fiction. Do you know how Philip K. Dick did The Man in a High Castle which is an answer to the question, What if the Nazis had won? Well, I wanted to make a movie in my mind of a complete mythos of a band, a town, a kid with a blog, and an alien. I wanted to create an entire mythological world that was Twin Peaks but based on my memories and my libidinous interest in grunge music.

That is 100% Garden of Delete. I’m like, “Holy shit, I just came off of tour opening up for Sigur Rós and Soundgarden and I can’t stop thinking about my pubescence, how I was overcome, possessed even, by grunge, which was only ever a music industry machination. It was a major label construction, the final dying gasp of punk rock. It was mass produced, packaged, and sold to me directly, perfectly, at age 12. I was patient zero, and now here I am opening up for Sigur Rós as the guy that made R Plus Seven. That was a very weird thing. I wanted to make a record in my abstract conceptual style as a way to maybe understand: How the fuck…? What’s grunge? What’s Sigur Rós and Soundgarden? What’s all that stuff that dominated me deeply as a pubescent boy? So the music I made during that era is about sex organs, and the grotesque stuff that happens to your body pubescence, and masculinity and femininity, and the era of grunge. It’s just a bratty kind of science fiction. Basically, I was continuing on a journey of making conceptual electronic records about my life.

EO

What about the album art? Like what the fuck? Where did that come from?

OPN

I made it with my friend Andrew Strasser. We would often hang out in Ditmas Park and search the Internet. We were obsessed with anything weird we could find from about 1994 to 1998. I was interrogating my fragmented and foggy memories of growing up as a massive alternative rock and grunge fan. I could barely remember because I was just a 12-year-old kid, so I had to speculate on it.

We started ripping weird stuff from the internet, that were kind of disquieting and scary—and approached making the art the same way I did the music. I was thinking about the formal thrust of all of these things that happened in grunge. I tried to distort them into a weird, compressed, abstracted picture of grunge as computer music. It’s really just a meditation on my pubescent years. That’s what that is. Sometimes you encounter these fuckers in the rooms and sometimes you don’t, sometimes there’s an object and sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes there’s people.

EO

That’s amazing.

OPN

It really is, I really thought it was the most profound thing I’d ever seen in my life. And that’s what R Plus Seven sounds like to me. Moving through a series of rooms in a kind of a sequential way, but also in a dilated, transcendent way where things are happening a little bit too slowly, too quickly, or whatever—something is just off.

EO

So how do you follow that? What were your thoughts behind your next album, Age Of (2018)?

OPN

If Garden of Delete is this funny abstraction of my weird, early 90s, distinctly American upbringing in the early ’90s, Age Of is a way of making music about the world which was changing rapidly and starting to look a lot like how Garden of Delete sounds. I needed to make an epic album about power, about intelligence, and about humanity. I wanted to take my shot at making a really big, operatic work—not just about one little sliver of my kind of psyche or my memories of music, but about culture and civilization on the whole. Trump was coming to power. Around that time, I remember hearing that Steve Bannon and Al Gore share the same favorite book.

It’s called The Fourth Turning and it’s about these big, epochal phases: the rise and fall of countries, civilizations, all that kind of bullshit. It’s a ridiculous book, but I love it as the armature for my weird, end-times dystopian opera. I made a four-part structure, these four epochs. I gave each of them names and unique mythologies. Music was slotted into each. The record was always meant to be an advertisement for this show, Myriad, which is basically the ultimate version of the album Age Of. I was lucky to be able to put it on a few times, but not that lucky because nobody really gave two fucks.

EO

On Drawn and Quartered, is the album cover for the Rifts reissue the same as the initial release?

OPN

No, it’s a new image. It was an homage to old library music records.

EO

Walk me through your work with the Safdies. What was it like to finally take on this pivotal role in filmmaking?

OPN

It was amazing. It felt like I had been paving a long, arduous path through a forest while I was putting out records and that it had finally led me to where I wanted to be all along, which was in film. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be involved in movies that I find interesting and want to work on. The part that’s hard for me is relinquishing control.

EO

Say more.

OPN

Well, when I make a record I can call the shots and do things exactly the way I like to. In the world of film that simply isn’t the case, and it was never going to be an easy thing to be in service to other people’s work. It took some effort and adjustment to evolve, to stop being a little prince who wants everything the way he wants it. But slowly I just figured it out. I’d put myself in the position of a craftsman and say, “How can I help you?”

EO

How do you reorient yourself to be in this collaborative mode with filmmakers?

OPN

Well, the majority of my experiences in the film industry have been with the Safdie brothers, and they work hands-on and in-depth. They know every inch of their movie, what it needs. They’re not guessing, and they would never say to me, “Hey, what do you think about this?” They’re like, “Here it is.” And you’re like, “Are you asking me to just be a tool?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “All right.”

It never really shakes out that way, though. There are ideas they might think are good but aren’t actually the best; sometimes they reach that conclusion themselves, sometimes I help them reach that conclusion. Sometimes I’ll say, “Just leave me alone.” I’ll take a couple days and do something, and maybe half the time they’re pleasantly surprised. It’s a lot of give and take. I often feel like, “All right, I get that you guys have mapped everything out, but now let’s see what happens when my energy gets wrapped up in that.” I don’t fight them and they don’t fight me, we’re sympathetic—but we do dance together. Sometimes one party takes the lead, and sometimes no one does.

EO

Good Time is alive and feels like a big departure from what you were saying earlier about thinking. It’s engrossed in the doing.

OPN

Yeah, that’s all Sean Price Williams. I think he’s kind of impatient and gets sidetracked. It’s weirdly his strength, though. He’ll just be like, “Oh, I’m going to go over here, I’m going to go over there.” He’s just moving around all the time and looking for the thing that’s exciting. He’s an investigator of excitement. That vibe is very interesting, and necessary in that context.

EO

Via the Safdies you begin working with The Weeknd, who’s weirdly a part of the same universe. What was it like to then start producing with him?

OPN

Yeah, through the Safdies I talked to Abel for the first time while working on Age Of. We connected right away. He was doing a form of vaporwave, experimental R&B at around the same time that I was doing an experimental version of Hypnagogic pop, this kind of liminal dream space between pop and electronic music.

We both had a similar disposition towards really dreamy, really sensual stuff that wasn’t exactly expected of the genres that we had come up in. We’re both really rebellious, too. And so this is after Starboy when Abel’s fame has never been bigger. He planned it that way, but he was already kind of like, “What should I do next? I want to keep transforming.” It’s like every good artist I’ve ever met seems to itch to just continuously go through metamorphosis, to keep going through those rooms.

EO

And then all of a sudden, you’re musical directing the Super Bowl. What were the conversations that led to that?

OPN

Well, I don’t know because every time it was brought up, I was just like, “Are you serious?” And Abel would be like, “Yeah.” And so, I’m like, “You want me to figure out this keyboard part? Alright. You want me to play keys while you sing the ballad from After Hours? Okay, I’ll do it.” I don’t stand down from a challenge like that. I would have been foolish not to do it, but I was shitting my pants, of course. I like to be in my studio and work on my stuff. But when called to action, I tend to relish in the excitement and the challenge of it all. I’ve been so lucky to be able to have these experiences, and to shy away from them would be silly even though they scare the living hell out of me.

EO

How did he ask you?

OPN

I was in Los Angeles trying to write the album that became Dawn FM, and then guess what? Abel comes in one day and goes like, “All right, hold your horses on this shit, we just got the Super Bowl.” I was like, “Are you serious?” He’s like, “Yeah, we got the Super Bowl, it’s like, a big deal,” And I’m like, “Okay, well, what can I do to help?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know, figure it out.” So, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna watch Michael Jackson’s Super Bowl, I’m gonna watch Prince’s Super Bowl, I’m gonna watch everybody.”

EO

What about Whitney Houston?

OPN

I didn’t see that one. I watched a bunch of them, then we talked, and I said, “Okay, we’re going to do the best montage of your music that we can possibly do. We’re going to make it really epic and cinematic for you. And I’m going to score the shit out of your montage. I’m going to treat it as if it’s a score.”

EO

A score for what? What was your vision?

OPN

I wanted it to be a sort of electronic music drama. We had recorded a choir and all these tools were available to us. But Abel’s music is made on computers. It’s electronic music, it’s pop music, which means that when I’m doing the Super Bowl, I envision it having like a druggie, trippy relationship to electronic sound. I don’t know what I was scoring, but I was making a medley, you know? I wanted it to feel integrated the way a score feels integrated, nothing is just randomly popping out of nowhere—like one big flowing snakelike experience of sound. The music and sound is all interlinked, so he can just flow over the top and feel like a big superstar.

EO

So, I have one more film thought. I was reading Transcendental Style in Film and thinking of the way it connects to your music.

OPN

Oh, Paul Schrader?

EO

Yeah. I specifically loved the introduction he wrote for the reissue. He talks about Slow Cinema, non-narrative film, and Tarkovsky.

OPN

He knows all about that stuff.

EO

Yeah. At one point he writes, “Film artists realized from the beginning they could use this neurological predisposition to manipulate the viewer. Cinema, after all, is only still images projected in rapid succession. The spectator will imagine the gun firing, the monster emerging from the cave, and so forth. Postwar filmmakers realized that just as Movement-Image could be manipulated to create suspense, Time-Image could be manipulated to create introspection. We not only fill in the blanks, but we create new blanks.” During our conversation I realized that your earlier music was focused on Movement-Image, and your later work is now focused on Time-Image.

OPN

I really have to thank you for that, because it’s not something that I think would ever have occurred to me so concretely.

EO

Yeah. You seem to have a different relationship to time in this later chapter of music making. I love pop music, but I hate listening to pop songs where the melody and lyrics are so linear that you can predict everything. I’m like, “Oh, that’s going to loop, that’s going to double back.” [Both laugh.]

OPN

I know, I hate it, and sometimes I have to do it. And the more I do it, the more I hate it. Honestly, I will get to a point where I’m not going to be able to physically take it anymore. Anyways, in the future I want to be dilating time. With the old music I was just annihilating it. You know how Schrader talks about normal filmmaking; he says the camera never really abandons the main object of the gaze. For instance, if the main character walks off screen in a standard film there will be a cut, whereas in transcendental cinema the camera might just stay on the doorknob for a time.

EO

Which creates a new relationship to time.

OPN

Yeah, because you’re basically slowing everything down. I want to be creating long swaths of that.

EO

To finish, I wanted to talk about your time at Hampshire College. I’m curious, was it a pivotal time?

OPN

Yeah, college was everything. I still have dreams about it. A real big awakening for me. I was a shy, amicable kid, but an introvert and a nerd. When I got to Hampshire, I was suddenly impressive, somehow. It was such a great experience to be around so many curious people. They were smart, they appreciated me, and I appreciated them. There was so much stuff going on in that area of Western Massachusetts. There were parties, there were kids from all over the country, and there were engaging professors. I didn’t know a single queer person growing up. There was nothing remotely queer about my adolescence in Massachusetts until college. If there was, everyone was hiding. And then I get to Hampshire and it’s just an explosion of queerness. That was fun. That’s who I wanted to be around, just people who were kind of making their own rules about their lives and everything.

EO

What was the curriculum like? Were you studying with Christoph Cox?

OPN

Yeah, I did. I studied philosophy and read a lot of music writing: Simon Reynolds, music journalism, and essays on the history of contemporary music, electroacoustic music, improvised music, minimalism, and electronic music. That was the first time I was like, “Oh my God, there’s so much to actually understand about what the fuck is going on out there.” I loved learning, and I still consider myself a student of nonfiction and theory. But I loved being in college, I loved being around interesting people that wanted to learn—I really did.

EO

Do you think your exposure to queerness at Hampshire prompted you to appreciate the necessity of mystique or the power of mystery?

OPN

Well, I think the thing that taught me the most was having friends that weren’t all from my shitty little town. It was like, “Hey motherfucker, you don’t know shit.” That’s what I really liked. I didn’t know what the rules were, but then I learned that there weren’t any. I used to hang out with this butch lesbian. One day, we were talking about this and that and then she flashes me. She just lifts up her shirt and flashes me, like in the middle of a conversation. And then she just erupts into laughter. I thought about it for like weeks on end after that. She just wanted to insert chaos and break the whole entire frame of the conversation; she was sick of it. She was like, “You know what? I’m going to get a rise out of Dan, make him a little uncomfortable, push his buttons a bit.” It was such a funny thing she did, it was so joyous. I remember thinking, “That’s actually what being free is on some level,” these little transgressions, these little things that break up the monotony of life. I don’t know if that has to do with mystery, but it was revelatory for me. A mystery started unfolding. I want to keep uncovering that mystery so that I can make mysteries for other people.