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Channel Pressure
Channel Pressure is the debut studio album of electronic music duo Ford & Lopatin, consisting of producers Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford. Following the group's abandonment of their previous name "Games" for legal reasons, they recorded the album at Gary's Electric Studios in Brooklyn, New York. It was released on June 7, 2011 as the first album to be issued on Software, Lopatin's own label under the Mexican Summer imprint.
Channel Pressure is a concept album about a teen named Joey Rogers who is brainwashed by voices from a supercomputer. Musically, the album draws on an eclectic variety of 1980s music styles, including electropop, white soul, R&B, jazz fusion, and new age, as well as cluttered and improved quality production techniques than heard on their previous releases. It features production and vocal contributions from Al Carlson, Autre Ne Veut, and Jeff Gitelman.
The album was promoted with two singles, "Emergency Room" and "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)." Channel Pressure garnered favorable reviews from professional music journalists upon its release, and was number 18 on a year-end list of the best albums of 2011 by Gorilla vs. Bear.
Ford & Lopatin formed in 2009 under the moniker Games. Their debut record That We Can Play (2010) was an extended play that was produced by recording and editing one single stereo Pro Tools improv jam. In an August 2010 interview, Ford said that he had recently met in Brooklyn with Jan Hammer's son, who was a fan of the Tigercity project, so he could talk about recording the synths for Games' first full-length album at Hammer's studio in upstate New York, and announced they would begin recording the LP at the studio in December: "We're honing in [sic] on the concept still, but it definitely involves athletic cuts and smooth jazz-fusion."
In the fall of 2010, Keith Abrahamsson and Andres Santo Domingo, founders of the imprint Mexican Summer, had a conversation with Ford and Lopatin where they suggested that the group form a new label and studio under Mexican Summer. In February 2011, the duo changed their name to Ford & Lopatin, reportedly to preempt legal issues with the Interscope Records artist Game, and started the label Software under Mexican Summer; Channel Pressure was Software's first release. Like That We Can Play, Channel Pressure was produced with the software Pro Tools. However, it was recorded in a much bigger studio with more advanced equipment, meaning the recording of the jam sessions involved instruments that were signaled to multiple channels instead of just one track all together like That We Can Play, which led to many more possibilities in how each song would be crafted and edited.
Lopatin said his use of the program for making Channel Pressure increased his comfort and familiarity with the program. He described the development process as "kind of a White Album thing going on where some songs were more driven by Joel, some by me. But whatever ideas were on the table, both of us were kind of throwing a lot of stuff together." The Gaia synth by Roland was used to achieve what he called "the weird scat dad sounds": "It's definitely like we wanted to do almost this J-pop, cartoony thing and to have this overload of interesting synth moments, Thomas Dolby style, where he's showing you all these little strange [...] but in a fun way that's not wanky, being a zoo of little synth emotions and shapes."
The style of Channel Pressure was described by Beats per Minute as a mixture of "80s throwback electropop, happy hooks, new-aged tinged video game overworld themes, Rhythm Nation-era industrial R&B, and a liberally applied layer of synthy cheese" and by Spin magazine as pastiche in the vein of Ariel Pink. Some critics noted the record's glitchy and hectic arrangements and sound structures. AllMusic described the album as "blurring the boundaries between brittle digi-funk, gooey, soft-focus R & B, wonky fusion jazz, noodly electro-prog, and chintzy new age." Scott Morrow of Alarm magazine categorized the album as a "modern and experimental twist" of 1980s music and described the sound as "Prefuse 73 twisting around the Miami Vice theme." In the words of Patrick Hajduch, another Alarm magazine journalist, Channel Pressure is a "jittery, looped amalgam of trashy ’80s vibes" where instrument and vocal recordings are decreased in sample rate, "deconstructed," and "smashed back together;" the record has a "smooth ’80s sound and quasi-R&B song structures" that contradict its "crazy programming."
The hectic sound editing is most prevalent in the instrumental facet of the album, where, as Conrad Tao of Sputnikmusic explained, "layers build upon one another and drop out without warning, beats appear out of nowhere, and flangers are employed liberally." PopMatters critic Richard Elliott noted a "stutter of the past" in the album's drum parts which was a symbol of the "general battle between analog and digital, “real” and synthesized, that occupied so much of that era’s aesthetics."
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Channel Pressure
Channel Pressure is the debut studio album of electronic music duo Ford & Lopatin, consisting of producers Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford. Following the group's abandonment of their previous name "Games" for legal reasons, they recorded the album at Gary's Electric Studios in Brooklyn, New York. It was released on June 7, 2011 as the first album to be issued on Software, Lopatin's own label under the Mexican Summer imprint.
Channel Pressure is a concept album about a teen named Joey Rogers who is brainwashed by voices from a supercomputer. Musically, the album draws on an eclectic variety of 1980s music styles, including electropop, white soul, R&B, jazz fusion, and new age, as well as cluttered and improved quality production techniques than heard on their previous releases. It features production and vocal contributions from Al Carlson, Autre Ne Veut, and Jeff Gitelman.
The album was promoted with two singles, "Emergency Room" and "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)." Channel Pressure garnered favorable reviews from professional music journalists upon its release, and was number 18 on a year-end list of the best albums of 2011 by Gorilla vs. Bear.
Ford & Lopatin formed in 2009 under the moniker Games. Their debut record That We Can Play (2010) was an extended play that was produced by recording and editing one single stereo Pro Tools improv jam. In an August 2010 interview, Ford said that he had recently met in Brooklyn with Jan Hammer's son, who was a fan of the Tigercity project, so he could talk about recording the synths for Games' first full-length album at Hammer's studio in upstate New York, and announced they would begin recording the LP at the studio in December: "We're honing in [sic] on the concept still, but it definitely involves athletic cuts and smooth jazz-fusion."
In the fall of 2010, Keith Abrahamsson and Andres Santo Domingo, founders of the imprint Mexican Summer, had a conversation with Ford and Lopatin where they suggested that the group form a new label and studio under Mexican Summer. In February 2011, the duo changed their name to Ford & Lopatin, reportedly to preempt legal issues with the Interscope Records artist Game, and started the label Software under Mexican Summer; Channel Pressure was Software's first release. Like That We Can Play, Channel Pressure was produced with the software Pro Tools. However, it was recorded in a much bigger studio with more advanced equipment, meaning the recording of the jam sessions involved instruments that were signaled to multiple channels instead of just one track all together like That We Can Play, which led to many more possibilities in how each song would be crafted and edited.
Lopatin said his use of the program for making Channel Pressure increased his comfort and familiarity with the program. He described the development process as "kind of a White Album thing going on where some songs were more driven by Joel, some by me. But whatever ideas were on the table, both of us were kind of throwing a lot of stuff together." The Gaia synth by Roland was used to achieve what he called "the weird scat dad sounds": "It's definitely like we wanted to do almost this J-pop, cartoony thing and to have this overload of interesting synth moments, Thomas Dolby style, where he's showing you all these little strange [...] but in a fun way that's not wanky, being a zoo of little synth emotions and shapes."
The style of Channel Pressure was described by Beats per Minute as a mixture of "80s throwback electropop, happy hooks, new-aged tinged video game overworld themes, Rhythm Nation-era industrial R&B, and a liberally applied layer of synthy cheese" and by Spin magazine as pastiche in the vein of Ariel Pink. Some critics noted the record's glitchy and hectic arrangements and sound structures. AllMusic described the album as "blurring the boundaries between brittle digi-funk, gooey, soft-focus R & B, wonky fusion jazz, noodly electro-prog, and chintzy new age." Scott Morrow of Alarm magazine categorized the album as a "modern and experimental twist" of 1980s music and described the sound as "Prefuse 73 twisting around the Miami Vice theme." In the words of Patrick Hajduch, another Alarm magazine journalist, Channel Pressure is a "jittery, looped amalgam of trashy ’80s vibes" where instrument and vocal recordings are decreased in sample rate, "deconstructed," and "smashed back together;" the record has a "smooth ’80s sound and quasi-R&B song structures" that contradict its "crazy programming."
The hectic sound editing is most prevalent in the instrumental facet of the album, where, as Conrad Tao of Sputnikmusic explained, "layers build upon one another and drop out without warning, beats appear out of nowhere, and flangers are employed liberally." PopMatters critic Richard Elliott noted a "stutter of the past" in the album's drum parts which was a symbol of the "general battle between analog and digital, “real” and synthesized, that occupied so much of that era’s aesthetics."