Magic Oneohtrix Point Never or One-oh-six-point-seven has, at least in my opinion, one of the most accurately futuristic sounds in music. Most artists attempt to make vicious efforts to have their music sound like the tip of bleeding-edge technology but find themselves to be sounding dated in just a couple of years. OPN is an exception to this as he conjures waves and waves of synths that feel timeless and endlessly interpretive. Despite his occasional references to the 80s and 90s in his other works, he moves onto a more contemporary take on electronic music with his work “R Plus Seven”, which is a conceptual album that gives off a very synthetic yet human feeling. It shows an almost utopian-like world where organic and machine live in symbiosis. Pretty much any techbro-billionaire’s wet dream.
But with the utopian pipedream that OPN painted with this album, it wouldn’t be complete without a dark underbelly. Most of the themes of utopia and the way humans are headed are in a satirical, flawed or purposefully phony light. His music has many imperfections and glitches despite trying to seem like a utopia, which shows that the reality that takes place in his music is simply just a facade. In his album “R plus Seven”, you can hear darker and sinister sounds brewing underneath the blankets of ambience. The 9th track on the album almost feels like a climax of all the darker elements that it was building up towards, it shows a dark lonely reality in the middle of an album that sounds like a prosperous, bustling city.
Another crucial thing the album has is the vast amounts of inspiration coming from contemporary aesthetics. He internalizes the current trends in technology and the shortcomings of them within music. One of the most notable contributing factors to this is his use of cheesy plugins and VSTs instead of the usual ominous sounding JUNO synthesizer that was so present in all of OPN’s works before this. You have probably heard these VST presets used for corporate muzak akin to something used for background music in a grocery store training video as they are relatively common and generic. What differentiates this album though is how he uses those presets and pushes the boundaries of them. The end product of the album sounds uncanny yet warm with how he makes complex and abstract compositions with such simple and commonly heard instrumentation. It’s your childhood home set on fire but then a tree sprouts from it and also someone builds a treehouse on it but then the treehouse collapses.
