Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Aidan Zamiri

MP In the press release for Tranquilizer, you mentioned being inspired by the music that plays while you’re at the dentist. Do you have dreams of your teeth falling out?

OPN I don’t. My recurring dreams tend to be me driving on these skyways, high above ground level, and veering off course. When I went to Shanghai for the first time a few years ago, I felt as though I had finally come to the living, breathing realisation of my dream. It was exactly how I imagined it.

MP So much of your music feels like it’s operating on a subliminal level: it’s emotional and physical, but disembodied. Do you think about the body while you’re composing? 

OPN It’s unavoidable with music, because you’re wiggling air in through your auditory system, which impacts all your other senses. When I’m working on a piece of music, I’m mostly interested in how it sounds on headphones, and what happens when you are in this enclosed sonic environment, this little incubator of one’s dreams. 

MP This album was informed by a big online musical archive disappearing and then reappearing. How were you thinking about digital memory in its creation?

OPN I had bookmarked an Internet Archive post and forgotten about it. When I came back, it was gone, but it had been mirrored somewhere. There was all this excitement of people trying to find it, all this culture being generated around the return of this archive. It was fun: it wasn’t some “everything gets washed away in the ocean of time” thing. At the same time, it makes you question what we want to preserve, and how we preserve it. 

MP There exists a kind of doomery perspective about the fallibility of digital storage. Things do disappear, but they sometimes come back as well. 

OPN Recently, I’ve been thinking about Timothy Morton’s theory of the hyperobject. Take something like a mountain that might have once been a molehill. Over millions of years, it changes form as the climate changes. If you only consider your relation to the object in a single moment, life becomes very bland. The object is always changing, you’re always changing, and it reflects your values. The artist testifies to the condition that they find themselves in when interacting with the world. That becomes useful as other things chip away. What survives contains archetypal, spiritual or historical information that gives us a sense of what the fuck was going on. 

MP In its use of readymade material, Tranquilizer feels like a return to your 2011 album Replica, which used samples from 1980s adverts. A happier Replica, perhaps.

OPN It’s worth comparing those two records, because they both deal with samples and readymade audio. This one has a sturdiness or clarity to it, and I understand why it may seem happier, but I was just more focused. 

MP Are there any forms of media which still feel mysterious, or has everything just become too legible, too flattened by exposure?

OPN Everything is flattened by exposure, and that’s exactly when the work begins. This is the rap sheet on the internet: that suddenly we had access to everything, and it was amazing, but now we have too much access, and we’re numb. I think it’s the wrong approach, because you’re letting whether something is novel or not dictate how you feel, and novelty wears off. The rhythmic armature of a song like “Measuring Ruins” is cascading waves of hi-hats, both good and bad. Every producer knows the feeling of trying to find the right kick or hi-hat sound, but I wasn’t interested in saying, “This is the greatest hi-hat I’ve ever heard in amongst 500 gigabytes of crap”. I wanted to say, “What can I make, as a composer, that feels like an abstraction of this digging process, of going through hi-hat after hi-hat?” It’s a hyperspeed slam through a shitty folder, you know? 

I keep going through this wellspring of music from the 1980s because it was a renaissance period for electronic music. Consumer electronics introduced all kinds of synthesisers into people’s homes, and so you’re getting a popularisation of what was considered laboratory music. I’ve always liked readily available things, and 1980s music represents this great bounty of available technology.

MP If the 1980s were a period of excitement at the dispersion of all these new media forms, does the optimism transmute if it’s sampled, or does it become a kind of lost future?

OPN A lot of the sounds from Tranquilizer were from the 1990s, when CD and computer technology created a market for commercial jingle makers. The sounds on these sample CDs are often really bad, but at other times, you can hear something idiosyncratic poking through the artifice. There’s so much happening in the idiom of, say, jungle music that was the result of people doing real things at a place in time. In these sample CDs, you can hear the drudgery of having to emulate drum’n’bass without any fundamental connection to the culture. They’re being made by people who don’t know what they’re doing, and you’re getting, by accident, things that don’t sound anything like their intended sound. It becomes raw material to do soul mining.

MP On past albums like Garden of Delete (2015), you’ve built entire online worlds around your music. Today, worldbuilding has become synonymous with branding. Did that awareness influence how you approached this record?

OPN I don’t think Garden of Delete doesn’t stand on its own – it’s one of the best projects I’ve been a part of. As we were creating it, we were doing these little side quests. The narrative of the album of this boy who’s having this pubescent sci-fi hallucination was so intrinsic. Garden of Delete is like Quadrophenia or Tommy: it should have been a musical on stage. But worldbuilding can steal attention away from the music. With Tranquilizer, the medium is the message: the process by which it was created generates a world in and of itself. Put the headphones on, strap in and close your eyes and go on this amusement park ride that doesn’t need to be explicitly marketed. There’s no angle, there’s no narrative. It’s a trip. .