Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer (2xLP)

"Tranquilizer" does not sound like calming down, but rather like re-emerging. Daniel Lopatin does not condemn our need to escape, but rather explores what happens afterwards. His new album traces a movement from weightless calm to something more grounded - not a hero's journey, but the necessary cycle of retreat and return that keeps us sane in a world that is as overwhelming as it is banal.  We tumble from the dripping bliss of "Lifeworld" into the sad melancholy of "Cherry Blue" and the spastic grooves of "Rodl Glide". As always with OPN, the real collides with the unreal. If you listen closely, you can hear the scratching of fingers on a fingerboard, a stone sliding across a dungeon floor, the squeak of a door opening. Lopatin's music was never an abstract field of color; it has weight, edges, shadows. While "R Plus Seven" was all crystalline arpeggiators and "Garden Of Delete" was a feverish vomit of gurgling synthesizers, "Tranquilizer" feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch.