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R Plus Seven
R Plus Seven is the sixth studio album by American electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never, released on September 30, 2013, as his debut album on Warp Records. The album's musical palette draws heavily on the synthetic sounds of MIDI instruments, 1980s synth presets, and VSTs.
R Plus Seven received critical acclaim, and was included on the year-end lists of several music publications. Its release came alongside several collaborations on visual accompaniment with contemporary artists such as Jon Rafman, Takeshi Murata, and Nate Boyce.
Differing from the sample-based techniques of Lopatin's 2011 album Replica which drew on lo-fi audio sources such as commercials from the 1980s and 1990s, the recording of R Plus Seven instead saw him work extensively with the synthetic sounds of MIDI instruments and presets, synth patches and VSTs. He also incorporated procedural composing methods and spoken word script samples created from a range of texts. It is the first Oneohtrix Point Never record not to feature Lopatin's signature Roland Juno-60 synthesizer. Regarding the sonic palette, he explained:
I like to be manipulated by the sounds I'm using, and then struggle to find some sort of commonality with those things [...] When I play a pipe organ or have this like Hollywood choir at my disposal, it's going to tap into some kind of cliché matrix of ideas in my mind, and allow me to wrestle with it.
Lopatin would later describe it as a "calm" record influenced by and aiming to musically capture his experience of "domestic bliss", and also confessed to being influenced by the ideas of object-oriented ontology and American contemporary artist Takeshi Murata, specifically "this idea of musical objects – instead of focusing on music, thinking of sounds as these acute choices that are grouped together, that create a sense of place, a cultural sense of contrast [...] a way of giving inanimate objects a kind of secret life."
The cover art is a reproduced still taken from the 1982 experimental film Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein by Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel. The album title is a reference to the procedural writing technique, "N+7", used by French writing group Oulipo, which involves replacing any noun in a text with the seventh one to follow it in a dictionary.
The sound palette of R Plus Seven incorporates a range of synthesized sounds spanning textures from early samplers, clear-sounding presets from the 1980s and 1990s, and modern "realist" virtual instruments found on DAWs. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson said that the album plays with "our collective unconscious of music technology" to make something "strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling." He stated that "there's a weird kind of innocence in this sound palette," comparing it to James Ferraro's 2011 album Far Side Virtual which similarly extensively incorporated digital instrumentation, but added that "Lopatin's music doesn't get hung up on irony, even though it's definitely in the mix." Adam Harper of Dummy compared the album to English experimental group Art of Noise, writing that it "might be what the computer that used to work for the Art of Noise does on its own time, an AI enthusiastically generating art, who once wouldn't admit to preferring modernism to postmodernism but now refuses to be ironic or ashamed of the so-called uncanny valley." Andy Battaglia of Rolling Stone described the album as being akin to "holy music, even if wholly weird," and compared it to the works of composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich in terms of rhythm and repetition. Richardson referred to the album as "Fifth World Music", an allusion to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, which similarly blended natural imagery with manipulated sound and synthesized sounds. The Skinny wrote that every song is significantly different in structure and timbre, with some songs playing on feelings reminiscent of cosmic jazz music. AllMusic wrote that "its subversive glossiness suggests that its tracks were made from pop songs that were shattered into shards that are as alluring as they are difficult to piece together."
Tracks like "Americans" and "Inside World" have been described as musically exploring differences between the Real and virtual representations of "realness", using then-exotic "turn-of-the-80s" sounds found on samplers of the time like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator as well as other delicate digital sounds to conjure stilted and sterilized imagery of jungles, beaches, forests and home environments. According to David Wolfson of Beat per Minute, R Plus Seven explores themes of morphogenesis, procedural composition and cryogenics. Describing the song "Zebra" in particular, Wolfson observed a "lively synth progression in the first part of the song" serving as the refrain for "an exercise in procedural composition", followed by "the claustrophobic ambient space of the second part" serving as "a representation of cryogenics", concluding that "the way the song progresses from section to section, with parts building up before splintering off into something completely new, is entirely morphogenetic in form."
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R Plus Seven
R Plus Seven is the sixth studio album by American electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never, released on September 30, 2013, as his debut album on Warp Records. The album's musical palette draws heavily on the synthetic sounds of MIDI instruments, 1980s synth presets, and VSTs.
R Plus Seven received critical acclaim, and was included on the year-end lists of several music publications. Its release came alongside several collaborations on visual accompaniment with contemporary artists such as Jon Rafman, Takeshi Murata, and Nate Boyce.
Differing from the sample-based techniques of Lopatin's 2011 album Replica which drew on lo-fi audio sources such as commercials from the 1980s and 1990s, the recording of R Plus Seven instead saw him work extensively with the synthetic sounds of MIDI instruments and presets, synth patches and VSTs. He also incorporated procedural composing methods and spoken word script samples created from a range of texts. It is the first Oneohtrix Point Never record not to feature Lopatin's signature Roland Juno-60 synthesizer. Regarding the sonic palette, he explained:
I like to be manipulated by the sounds I'm using, and then struggle to find some sort of commonality with those things [...] When I play a pipe organ or have this like Hollywood choir at my disposal, it's going to tap into some kind of cliché matrix of ideas in my mind, and allow me to wrestle with it.
Lopatin would later describe it as a "calm" record influenced by and aiming to musically capture his experience of "domestic bliss", and also confessed to being influenced by the ideas of object-oriented ontology and American contemporary artist Takeshi Murata, specifically "this idea of musical objects – instead of focusing on music, thinking of sounds as these acute choices that are grouped together, that create a sense of place, a cultural sense of contrast [...] a way of giving inanimate objects a kind of secret life."
The cover art is a reproduced still taken from the 1982 experimental film Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein by Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel. The album title is a reference to the procedural writing technique, "N+7", used by French writing group Oulipo, which involves replacing any noun in a text with the seventh one to follow it in a dictionary.
The sound palette of R Plus Seven incorporates a range of synthesized sounds spanning textures from early samplers, clear-sounding presets from the 1980s and 1990s, and modern "realist" virtual instruments found on DAWs. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson said that the album plays with "our collective unconscious of music technology" to make something "strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling." He stated that "there's a weird kind of innocence in this sound palette," comparing it to James Ferraro's 2011 album Far Side Virtual which similarly extensively incorporated digital instrumentation, but added that "Lopatin's music doesn't get hung up on irony, even though it's definitely in the mix." Adam Harper of Dummy compared the album to English experimental group Art of Noise, writing that it "might be what the computer that used to work for the Art of Noise does on its own time, an AI enthusiastically generating art, who once wouldn't admit to preferring modernism to postmodernism but now refuses to be ironic or ashamed of the so-called uncanny valley." Andy Battaglia of Rolling Stone described the album as being akin to "holy music, even if wholly weird," and compared it to the works of composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich in terms of rhythm and repetition. Richardson referred to the album as "Fifth World Music", an allusion to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, which similarly blended natural imagery with manipulated sound and synthesized sounds. The Skinny wrote that every song is significantly different in structure and timbre, with some songs playing on feelings reminiscent of cosmic jazz music. AllMusic wrote that "its subversive glossiness suggests that its tracks were made from pop songs that were shattered into shards that are as alluring as they are difficult to piece together."
Tracks like "Americans" and "Inside World" have been described as musically exploring differences between the Real and virtual representations of "realness", using then-exotic "turn-of-the-80s" sounds found on samplers of the time like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator as well as other delicate digital sounds to conjure stilted and sterilized imagery of jungles, beaches, forests and home environments. According to David Wolfson of Beat per Minute, R Plus Seven explores themes of morphogenesis, procedural composition and cryogenics. Describing the song "Zebra" in particular, Wolfson observed a "lively synth progression in the first part of the song" serving as the refrain for "an exercise in procedural composition", followed by "the claustrophobic ambient space of the second part" serving as "a representation of cryogenics", concluding that "the way the song progresses from section to section, with parts building up before splintering off into something completely new, is entirely morphogenetic in form."