His soundtrack shredded audiences’ nerves. Now producer Daniel Lopatin is using radio to bring Trump’s America together
It has been a peculiar 2020 for many of us, but Daniel Lopatin’s has been odder than most. In January, the warped electronica that he makes under his pseudonym Oneohtrix Point Never soundtracked a hit
Netflix movie, the nerve-shredding Adam Sandler thriller Uncut Gems. On 8 March, he tasted the primetime life, playing a song he had written with the Weeknd on
Saturday Night Live. Daniel Craig introduced them, a few weeks before the new Bond film was due to be released. “I was shitting bricks if I can be totally candid,” the slightly less famous Daniel says.Fifteen days later, Covid-19 locked down
New York. Stuck in his flat, his studio out of bounds, Lopatin had to make
music in his bedroom like he did when his recording career began. Granted, life had changed since his 2007 debut, Betrayed in the Octagon: he’d spearheaded a genre, vaporwave, by narcotically slowing down excerpts of well-known songs, and collaborated with David Byrne, FKA twigs and Iggy Pop. He still had a poky bedroom, though. “If I’d pushed my chair back making music, it would hit the bed and I’d end up hurting my ankle,” he laughs, sitting in the same room on an autumn afternoon.