Film scores are complicated puzzles that you need to figure out and solve very quickly, or else you're basically fired. You're hired to enhance the film and you only have a couple tries to prove that you are capable of that task. I can keep trying to enhance my album ad infinitum.
— Oneohtrix Point Never
John Martin was a great, complex folk singer, and later on, his music became more and more melancholic as he went through a separation with his wife.
I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That's always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.
I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work.
I wasn't always totally interested solely in music as a sort of visceral expression of people in unison and synchronized, a federated expression of a group of people. I loved it as a wallflower, as a fan, but when I was in it, I always felt like I wasn't built for it.
I had it calcified inside me that that was the ultimate state of composing. Being Brian Wilson. Being simultaneously a genius and sort of lost at sea - not really knowing what you're doing but reaching for the stars.
I was born in '82 and there were these bizarre wars, explained through mass media in ways that made no sense. I remember watching the Gulf War through night vision. That was sold and propagated as a showbusiness moment for the news.
I just like cliches. I like tvtropes.com. It's pretty much my bible.
Yeah it would be really cool to disappear. Like Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger.' Isn't that the final frontier? Being able to erase everything everyone knows about you and just be a stranger has become extremely seductive.
The dumber the thing is, the more excitement I get from imagining a very complex world of truth around it.
Games is like hardwired plumbing in the house of pop. It's not pop itself, its sort of like the behind-the-scenes arteries and capillaries of pop music.
I'm not a scientist.
I saw Double Leopards play at my school and realized there were other ways to approach noisy music that weren't necessarily aggressive. That became a very important concept for me as a musician. I don't think I would have been that interested in creating and performing my own music if it wasn't for this group.
The subject is missing from 'Replica' - it's about malleability of materials, and working with metaphor, and sculpting in time. So that makes a collaboration with another person who pushes sound in a sculptural way appealing, because you're like, 'Let's see what dimensionality is introduced from this other perspective that I might not have.'
I don't think I could make a good film, but I could definitely score a good film.
When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.
No one is mediating aesthetic choices on an OPN album other than myself.
Eccojams are a very simple exercise where I just take music I like, and I loop up a segment, slow it down, and put a bunch of echo on it - just to placate my desire to hear things I like without things I don't.
I really don't care if anyone thinks I'm special or not, I just want to be able to live my life without thinking about money all the time, or where I'm going to get it.
I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.
I'm like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.
It's stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I've solved that problem I'm not going to feel like I've achieved too much.
I like explication of ideas, even if I'm wrong or even if it's a struggle or if it's a work in progress.
Kitsch is very important to me.
All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.
Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is... it's the scene with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first 'Batman,' the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.
OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.
It's not like I actually understand the properties of sound.
There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.
I'm basically like a dad; I've always been a dad.
I was always screwing around with music, but I really wanted to go to film school when I was in high school. I guess what happened was that I didn't get into Tisch, that's what happened. I got deferred. And I went to Hampsire and ended up making music like everybody else there.
I need weird breakages to happen for music to feel true to life, and I think that also applies to good film scores.
Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don't exist.
To me, 'Garden of Delete' is a way of describing the idea that good things can bloom out of a negative situation. All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever.
I'm down for indefinitely chilling as long as I'm not self-aware during it. That seems like it could be torture on some level but a lot of people pray for that so who knows.
I've made my most horrible inhuman tendencies work for me.
We had a band called the Grainers. In our 12-year-old minds, this was like a double entendre for like being annoying and being a delicious donut. I got kicked out of the band for playing bass incorrectly. Like, I was playing it like a guitar. I was just so like twee and British, even as like the little 12-year-old boy.
I was never totally sold on this idea that I'm just a musician. I wanted to be the Tim Burton of music.
It's sad to me that the main stage of history is a story of how we became this visually obsessed, extremely narcissistic, extremely concerned about image, culture. At least in the West.
The promotional cycle's this staging area for failure. I hate it! Why bother when everyone's either gonna steal the album or copy it?
The thing that I've always been a little bit jealous of is a complete, a total giving to one form, like a genre, and just a mastery of it. My thing is very different. It's a complete embrace of something, but I've never been able to say, 'I believe in this.' The only thing I believe in is that I'm in this perpetual state of disbelief.
Games isn't really pop music, and neither is OPN. Both are part of the same ecosystem and both deal with exploring the undercurrents of pop music.
I'm super into dudes like Megazord, Jon Rafman, Rasmus Emanuel Svensson, Tabor Robak, and Michael Willis to name a few.
My friend and I were in a band together and we used to always refer it it as 'floor-core,' meaning that we would sit on the floor and play stuff.
That's a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: 'Hey, isn't it something that's in bad taste?'
I realize that I've had Ian Van Dahl: 'Castles in the Sky,' the Ibiza jam, periodically stuck in my head for years, like years of my life. Every now and then 'Castles in the Sky' will just happen. Maybe that's some sort of indication that it's actually my favorite song of all time.
I love thinking of music of this way to access some kind of illogical realm filled with all kinds of aberrations and weird stuff. It's not implicit in music to have a story, so it creates this incredible potential for vague stories.
For so many people, it's very hard to feel okay with success, because success is not cool. It supposedly tarnishes your thing; it ruins little pockets of scenes and the self-importance that comes from thinking you're the only people in your town that are doing something.
