Song Exploder - Oneohtrix Point Never - Sticky Drama

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

Daniel Lopatin has been making experimental electronic music as Oneohtrix Point Never since 2007. In this episode, he takes apart the song "Sticky Drama," from his 2015 album Garden of Delete. He breaks down how he created artificial voices using software for the vocals, and how he sees his songs as pieces of science fiction. This episode is sponsored by Loma Vista Recordings, Slack, and Moogfest. To win a pair of tickets to Moogfest, enter here.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. Daniel L. Patton has been making experimental electronic music as one-o-tricks point never since 2007. In this episode, he takes apart the song Sticky Drama from his 2015 album, Garden of Delete. Coming up, he'll break down how he created artificial voices using software for the vocals, and how he sees his songs as, pieces of science fiction. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway.

You're listening to Song Exploder. This is Daniel O'Padon, aka. One Otricks Point Never. I wanted to conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions and also sugary textures and create a psycho scribble, like the way a little kid will psychotically drawn his notebook

and it just has this live wire vibe to it. I got inspired by this particular plugin called Serum. It's just a software synthesizer. The main progression. It was a preset that we tweaked in Serum. And the sound tells you how to play it in a way. That's what I like about presets, is they kind of beg to be played some way

and you have to decode them. The obvious way to use that preset was to play it on the higher octaves and do a kind of like a hard style EDM beat. Like what? What's a good example? I don't know. It all just goes to chat, chat, chat, chat. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dong.

You know, it's just heinous. And so let's find some other meaning for this or find some other way to deal with us. The lead vocals, it's a software synthesizer called Chip speech. I like this sort of saccharine, cartoon-y, ridiculous voice. The aspect of it, that's nice is that I can input the lyrics and then play them chromatically. You have these text lines in the window

and you put whatever you want and essentially you press down in a note that means read the first syllable. So everything has to be an individuated instance of the note to get through the phrase. So it creates all of these weird difficulties because that's not a natural way to play. Then from there it got even more complicated and fun

where I can have this kind of gestural, contoured line within a phrase or within a word. If you just played it on a normal instrument, it would just sound like garbage, but tailored to the way that this piece of software is thinking, it just sounds wild. This song requires a bounty of moods. So I thought it would be amusing to put the devil

on the shoulder of this sugary voice, you know. And so halfway through you, you're introduced this other character that's like the weird demon vocalist. What happened there was we used chip speech, but we put a vocoder on it as a filter and then automated in a very granular way, like almost a microscopic way,

these formant shifts. If you're wondering what a formant is, if you've ever seen someone's voice displayed as a sound wave on a computer, the sound wave is made up of all these peaks and valleys. Those peaks are formants, and they're what gives someone's voice its particular character. So that's what Daniel is manipulating.

So as he's singing, these filters are opening up and closing on the voice, very small shifts layered upon each other with these different shifts at different times. Then we're done again iteratively over and over until you get something very far away from the original. Essentially, we're just messing around trying to get a different color and see like, well, can we get away from Chip's speech a little? bit. You know, it worked there as the lead melody, but what else can we do? Honestly, I didn't

even really think it was going to work. I thought it was just going to be absurd at best, and then we can decide if it's music or not, but I was so happy with it. That's a YouTube of, it's a girl who has a YouTube channel where she, I think she generally talks about makeup. She gives makeup tips and stuff. In this particular video, she's like, how. I mean, a really bad day. And she's just like, I just hate that, you know, you would be judged for whatever, like, just messed up. And she has, like, a little breakdown. And I just loved her voice.

But I also love the sentiment of just talking to your audience and being like, what is wrong with the world? And then she reveals this deep existential frustration she has. I don't know. I thought that that was touching. She is like the bridge between the light and dark, and her voice actually gets pitched down to match the plateau of evil that is that other demonic grind character. I'm not a person that needs to have the Wi-Fi off.

I have like 12 tabs open. I'm talking to people. I'm looking at stuff. And so I think naturally that helps me. It's like just another synthesizer in the room. Somehow I got the phrase sticky drama, which was this website. It was like a gossip website about like kind of like online personalities. I liked that phrase because there's like a double entendre to me of that was like, oh, that's like ejaculating for the first time is like sticky drama.

It's that moment where you're totally shocked. You have this new relationship to your body that you've never had. That's very dramatic. Instead of making music that might work for film, I think of it as the complete inversion. I don't think this works at all for films. I think it works like a film. The way a director working on a film

might make certain decisions about putting you in an environment, like you're looking at the most private, most inner thoughts of an adolescent teen and their desire, and this is like the music that might be generated out of those desires. That's probably the best way I can put it, that it's some kind of hybrid of adolescent frustration, and then the entry, the way we enter into the piece of music

where you have those layers of piano and plucks, and that's kind of like the Greek choir. That's kind of like the expository thing that says, okay, within this melancholic landscape where the sky is red, and there's smoke everywhere. Let's go very specifically now into this house where these things are happening.

So that's how I try to set things up and think in an almost kind of sentiment to graphic style. Like, I don't actually love it to go too nuts with drums. I really just want them to almost be subliminal. There's just so easy to screw up. And I just like the kind of knucklehead quality to it. That's all you want. See, that's a thing that no one would ever really hear unless you isolated it because it's so blended into the lattice work of that moment that's so thick.

That was a synth called Enzyme, and it was like a really buggy synth that crashed all the time, but it was the most corrosive, gray, poisonous sound. I love that synth. It's like a little sweetener for the phrase, but each one of those layers in that section are so strange and so awesome and satisfying,

and ultimately you just hear it as like a big casserole, but it is kind of nice to hear it on its own. To me, what I'm doing is a bit closer to like what a science fiction writer does. My job as like a science fiction musician is to speculate on these kind of imaginary modes of music that to me don't exist

yet. And now here's sticky drama by one oh tricks point never in its entirety. Visit songexplotor.net for more information on one oh tricks point never. Special thanks this episode to Breakmaster's cylinder, who turned Daniel Lopatin's description of hard-style EDM into an actual piece of music. I don't know, it all just goes to chat, chat, chat, jat, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dong.

If there are any linguists, speech pathologists, or acoustic engineers who would like to correct my definition of a forement, please send your angry emails to contact at songexploder.net. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of it. a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishykech, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way

of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on

stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs were out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Next time on Song Exploder. I'm Iggy Pop. Song Exploder is a proud member of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

Radiotopia is made possible with support from MailChimp, the Knight Foundation, and you, the listeners. You can find Song Exploder and all the other Radiotopia shows at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks for listening.