For fans of the mid ’00s noise underground, there was something redemptive—and no doubt a little surreal—about seeing Daniel Lopatin win this year’s Soundtrack Award at Cannes, the most prestigious film festival in the world. Lopatin’s early shows as Oneohtrix Point Never primarily took place in Providence basements, and his work was mostly relegated to handmade cassettes and CD-Rs. But with each successive release, Lopatin pushed his sound in bolder and more dynamic directions. By the release of 2015’s Garden of Delete, he found himself on tour with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden, working with David Byrne and FKA twigs.
Somewhere along the way, Lopatin began dabbling in film. He worked with Sofia Coppola’s go-to composer Brian Reitzell on 2013’s The Bling Ring before taking on a solo score two years later, for the disturbing Australian drama Partisan. Though guarded against giving himself over to the soundtrack world, Lopatin found kindred obsessives in the Safdie Brothers. Lifelong New Yorkers Joshua and Ben Safdie began writing and directing films around the same time that Lopatin was putting out the earliest OPN albums. Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What introduced to audiences the brothers’ all-consuming cinematic vision—an aesthetic that wasn’t all that different from Lopatin’s, with each project creating a highly detailed new world.
Out this week, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time is an homage to the gritty realism of 1970s cinema—think Mean Streets, Dog Day Afternoon, Marathon Man, and Night Moves. Robert Pattinson obliterates his teen heartthrob past with a nerve-jangling performance as the maniacal Connie Nikas, a Greek immigrant whose bank robbery goes awry. This leaves him in the outer-boroughs purgatory of New York City in the wee hours of the night, trying to get his brother (played by Ben Safdie) out of jail. Ratcheting up the tension every step of the way is Lopatin’s score. While almost every Oneohtrix Point Never album is as unalike as siblings, Good Time draws on all aspects of Lopatin’s catalog, from the dread-infused arpeggios of Russian Mind to the synthesized choirs of R Plus Seven to the desiccated metal of Garden of Delete.
We chatted with Lopatin as he was heading up to rural Massachusetts to spend a month at an architectural house with no right angles, where he’ll put the finishing touches on the next Oneohtrix Point Never album.
Pitchfork: Over the end credits of the film is “The Pure and the Damned,” a song you recorded with Iggy Pop. How did that collaboration happen?
Daniel Lopatin: There was this Lewis song “Like To See You Again” that I thought might work for the end, but it was too involved tracking him down. My manager said something like, “Think big,” and I said, “Iggy Pop.”
I went back to the studio and wrote this weird ballad and a top line to it, because obviously I do not sing in a baritone. I heard this tune in my head, so I sampled some Tuvan throat-singing, just to give him some general reference to what I was thinking. But I just wanted him to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. Iggy’s like a poet laureate to me. The man couldn’t be sweeter, and when we talked he was sharing these stories of having grown up in a trailer community in Michigan. These stories were in and of themselves just like listening to a crazy Richard Brautigan poem or something. We were just all really in awe. Anyway, Iggy was like, “Hey, I watched the movie. What I get from it is that essentially, paraphrasing, but everybody’s fucked. Nobody gets out.”
Your first soundtrack was The Bling Ring, but I did find a credit you have for this 2007 short film, The Replacement Child.
That’s my friend Justin who I grew up with. He basically gave me an opportunity to do something I didn't know how to do. It is quite weird, because you start asking yourself all of these questions: How tethered does the music need to be to the film? What’s the formal relationship between the beats of the music? How do I get to one point in a timeline to another? Do beats matter?
It wasn’t until I was working with Brian Reitzell on The Bling Ring that I was getting some hot tips. There was a sex scene that didn’t even make the movie. It was day three, and Brian was like, “Okay, sex scene, go.” I was like, “Fuck, this is so confusing. What do you want me to write? People are having sex and then you’re just playing some melody over it?” It forces you to think about all of these crazy implications—the meaning that’s suddenly attached to your decisions. The most important thing he taught me was: “Don't tether anything to anything. Just intuitively work around the visual beats of the film. Find a way for the score to rub up against it without mirroring.” That made perfect sense to me, because that’s how I approach things anyway. I'm trying always to find some kind of contrasting thing that will somehow feel more truthful. It’s the same reason I’m worried that my more recent stuff has been running too much on the grid. I need weird breakages to happen for music to feel true to life, and I think that also applies to good film scores.
Did you turn down projects after The Bling Ring?
Yes. 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.
It wasn’t until I hooked up with the Safdies that I felt okay, like they were going to give me as much rope as I want but that I understood what they needed. They sent me a mood board with SpongeBob on it. Good Time is a heist film, a crime thriller, so there were images from “Cops,” Raising Arizona, ’80s horror film posters, and these photos of hyenas. Then there was some SpongeBob blotter. I was like, “All right, these kids are definitely doing something I’m interested in.”
When we actually started talking about the music, some alarm bells went off because there was a lot of talking about Tangerine Dream. I like Tangerine Dream, but there’s a lot of Tangerine Dream that’s maybe more on the work side than the art side.
Tangerine Dream’s score for Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s now-reconsidered box-office bomb, definitely came to mind. Plus Good Time does reflect this ’70s antihero making increasingly terrible decisions and sinking further into the abyss.
It’s very cool that there is this vaguely formal idea that the soundtrack of bad decision-making is somehow linked to hypnotic Krautrock keyboards. It's so strange that that became the sound of men reflecting on their nature. But I also wanted to fuck with [’70s prog musicians like] Steve Hillage and Goblin and Sensations’ Fix.
When we were working on the film, Josh and Ben would remind me to go harder and more out, because it’s very easy to mimetically revert back to [Tangerine Dream founder] Edgar Froese—it’s just in my DNA. Then Josh is in the room being like, “No, make it more fucked up.” His expression was, “Get micro,’ because he’s the exact same way.
One thing that struck me about the soundtrack is that it seems to touch on all your previous sounds.
When I was trying to explain the score to somebody, I was like, “Well you know how James Cameron basically wanted to make Terminator 2 when he was making Terminator, but he hadn't refined his craft enough to do it?” The technology needed to catch up to his ambitions. I think it was like that for me. I wanted to make something that sounded like Good Time back when I was doing the early stuff, but I didn’t quite know how yet. But I really like the old stuff in the sense that when I listen to it, I hear me being alone and not knowing too much. I remember those basement apartments. I remember those weird gigs. I remember the looper pedal and MSQ-700 sequencer that’s weird to program. It felt like a closure to that time.
The soundtrack was about also activating weird environmental sound design. The best example of that is when Connie uses the hydraulic lift of that Access-A-Ride bus. I loved the hydraulic lift so much, so I figured out what key it was in. My thought was that if the music could somehow be in concert with the key of the hydraulic lift, it’s going to be subliminally cool. That kind of sonic language embedded in the film also refers to those New York textures. It makes New York feel like this bioluminescent, science-fiction, sentient being, even though it’s real brutalist.
Looking back, would you say there was a latent visual aspect to your early albums? Did you imagine them functioning as soundtracks?
Yeah, but I also remember early on thinking it was really funny that everybody has their Made to Measure moment where they’re like, “This is my imaginary soundtrack for a film yet to be released. Impressed?” Every single person that makes soundtrack music has that moment, and they’re all seemingly unaware of each other. I was just a little bit grossed out by that idea.
I remember with [2009 album] Russian Mind, I thought, “Okay, I'm seeing now that Betrayed in the Octagon, Russian Mind, and Zones Without People are basically this Stanislaw Lem-style trilogy of stories about vague metaphysical sci-fi.” 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.
