Whether coincidence or by design, the first leaked track off of Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica is a hypnogogic collage, and were that a normal idiom to compose in, it'd be of the more traditional vein: apparently most of the samples on the album (and clearly here on “Sleep Dealer”) come from “television advertisement compilations” — the kind of root source that speaks directly to Will Sweeney/David Keenan's opening salvos in Wire that called hypnagogic realms “the ones between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams…”
It's now a sort of old conversation to dredge up–the conceptual roots of a genre of specifically 80s-imbibing pastiche–but the instinct to create dreamscapes out of obsolete source materials has an infinite scope, and tends to not only hold a mirror to the time the material comes from, but also to the resiliency of their tonal meaning in ours.
If Returnal and Rifts, and Zones Without People were passageways to a kosmiche universe, Replica is a more familiar conversation in which many of Daniel Lopatin's peers have already made statements in the past few years. “Sleep Dealer” indicates that the album's found its own particularly woozy territory to sway on.
Oneohtrix Point Never, “Sleep Dealer”
Replica is out October 8 on Software Recording Co. / Mexican Summer.
