ALWAYS EVERYTHING

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER // RETURNAL 7”

Editions Mego

>Stream/Buy from Boomkat<

It’s easy to forget how lovely 7” vinyl is until it’s actually in your hand and finding its way out of its sleeve. It’s an entirely different experience to putting on a 12”, small size somehow lending a sense of limited space filled and an urgency that accompanies that. And this 7” of reimaginings of Daniel Lopatin’s spectrally beautiful ‘Returnal’, taken from his deliciously intangible album of the same name on Editions Mego, feels even tinier and more delicate than usual. The kaleidoscopic nature of Steven O’Malley’s essentially simple artwork – built up from interlocking geometric shapes and broken lines – serves to further enhance the skeletal soul of the original track.

As does Antony’s presence, replacing Lopatin’s effects-drenched vocal with one stripped of disguise and artifice. It’s certainly not a collaboration that springs immediately to mind when you take each musician’s typical mode of operation into account, but it proves to be an inspired choice. The original track’s oceanic synth wash and gently stuttering melody is replaced by a looped piano arrangement, but one which still retains that Oneohtrix-ish feeling of simmering unease and sadness. It hints at the fathomless depths that lie just below the surface of the original, but Antony’s vocal turn shifts Lopatin’s lyrics into plain view, creating a tension between music and voice that ebbs and flows with surprising ease. He draws attention to the weighty subject matter the lyrics dwell upon, and, most impressively of all, on returning to the source material Lopatin’s voice suddenly loses its cryptic edge, filling the piece with a stately gravitas it previously only alluded to. 

Fennesz’s remix goes one better though, melding both versions together into something of a definitive edition. It’s coated in his typical dense mesh of static and decay, but Antony’s vocal is left largely untreated in the midst of it all – save the long bubble trails that tail out after the end of each phrase – and Lopatin’s mumblings occasionally rear into the foreground before retreating again. It’s pretty cliché at this point to describe both Oneohtrix Point Never and Fennesz as making marine music, but this track serves as a potent reminder that both their latest albums felt entirely concerned with addressing the ocean’s ‘great unknown’ nature. In the case of Fennesz’s Black Sea it was all about the shoreline and the muddy regions where the land dissolves away to nothing, while Returnal was like being dropped off the side of a boat into open water; melded together they feel like the whole package.

Rory