Oneohtrix Point Never has announced the release of a new album, Again, scheduled for release September 26 via Warp Records.
It's Daniel Lopatin's tenth full-length project, and his first since 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never; since then, he's produced albums for The Weeknd and Soccer Mommy and scored an animated Star Wars short for Disney+. Again is said to incorporate orchestral and post-rock elements and features contributions from Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Jim O'Rourke, among others.
Lopatin has reportedly experimented with generative AI while producing the new record, working with the AI-powered text-to-music sample generator Riffusion to produce vocals for the track Locrian Midwest. Also utilized was OpenAI's Jukebox, a pioneering neural network-based music generator from the company behind ChatGPT that predates tools such as Google's MusicLM by several years.
The album's credits also tell us that Lopatin utilized Adobe's Enhanced Speech software to generate vocal sounds; though it's intended to clear up low-quality vocal recordings for podcasts, the software can also be repurposed to summon unearthly digital voices from any audio that's fed into it. Has Lopatin been reading our guide to using generative AI in music production?
Elsewhere in the credits, we can spot something called 'dax', presumably referring to the daxophone, a curious wooden instrument that produces voice-like timbres amplified by contact microphones. It seems that romplers played a key role in the album's conception, having been credited on eight of the thirteen tracks, while Jim O'Rourke's contributions were produced with the now-discontinued sound design workstation Capybara, manufactured by Kyma.
Yesterday, Lopatin shared the video for A Barely Lit Path. Watch it below.
Pre-order Oneohtrix Point Never's Again on Bandcamp.
Revisit our 2015 interview with Oneohtrix Point Never.
