soundtrack for the american subconscious

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the latest album from Daniel Lopatin—who records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never—feels as though it’s been beamed from the antenna of a deep space probe directly into your ears. The album registers like a radio broadcast from another reality, perhaps one parallel to our own, almost inchoate and yet somehow fully formed.

Part of that otherworldliness comes from the way Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is structured. It hangs around a series of cross-talk interludes, which are themselves mashed-up FM broadcasts recorded across America. They spin between daytime and nighttime talk formats—morning news chatter and sultry call-in shows collaged with and against each other—and the effect is orienting: The mood of each interlude attunes the listener to new frequencies.
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The album progresses in this way, with each track making psychic room for the one that comes after it. The journey was intentional, Lopatin told Apple Music. “You’re in alarm clock territory,” he said. “You’re waking up kind of inside the fucking radio, not listening to it. I really want the setting of the album to be almost within a kind of psychic environment--Magic Oneohtrix Point Never as a radio station. So you’re waking up. Time to get on with the day.”

Here.