Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer
Tranquilizer
Oneohtrix Point Never
Nicholas (Nick) Caceres
December 6, 2025
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In the 1990s, commercial CDs were manufactured as a profitable means of sourcing samples and sounds, some even outright stealing pre-existing creations. Presently, digital downloads and ripping cater to this need. AI, for some people, could offer a different – yet even more nefarious – option. To mosaic a sound together in the facsimile of something “found”. To pass off shards of something old as new, masquerading as old. Recent AI forays into the music space have been met with backlash.
Amid this upheaval, Oneohtrix Point Never releases Tranquilizer, an undeniable ode to real retrieved sound and its inevitable corruption.
Famously – but perhaps not correctly – credited with the first fully-fledged vaporwave project, Oneohtrix Point Never‘s newest release journeys into being via a legion of vintage sample CDs that were erased from the internet’s most trustworthy archives. Using these discs, pre-fab beats, and ROMplers as a starting point, this toggle between loss and eventual re-emergence became the emotional narrative of Tranquilizer. This is a grand culmination of everything that makes so much of Lopatin’s work timely, a balancing of the two themes that fill his work: nostalgia and existentialism.
The minimalist environments of past releases like Replica or R Plus Seven have fully bloomed as Lopatin drowns the listener in dense collages that feel busy, constantly on the move, yet never fully reaching a destination. In Lifeworld, a revolving flair of gurgling-synthed bongos, and beautifully crafted synths. Even at its most unpredictable, each element is given room to exhale, shifting every second, a true testament to Lopatin’s refined mixing. In the midst of all of this orderly chaos, there is an Eyewitness-derived flute, the dated contents screaming outwards as their essence is sullied by time and tech-rot.
Tranquilizer crawls even further back into Lopatin’s repertoire of techniques with Fear of Symmetry, sharing similarities with Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 in how Lopatin patterns out specific chop, leaving the pops and gouges for all to see, ducking and flickering out, creating a uniquely refined melody.
The fear of symmetry is often defined as symmetrophobia, and Lopatin’s melancholically serene yet off-centre compositions stumble along in an uneven and almost human way, like the jerking steps of a humanity contorted and stratified in data.
The finale of the album forms a microcosm. Waterfalls opens up with descending ripples of aquatic keys and padding percussion, a low-poly but enticing scene of tropical ecosystems unveils in our minds. The sample CD immediately presents mood and atmosphere in a still life.
This then begins to move into a more fractured state, building in a variety of keyboard-adjacent instrumentation. Voices rub against the growing environment, the vision brightens. Oneohtrix Point Never builds on the unspoken beauty of aged data. Through these textures, Lopatin emboldens these sounds of the past to be gloriously emotive in the face of emerging generative tools. The track ends with a tighter rhythmic section, a tongue curling vocal sample, and even an acoustic guitar. Suddenly, one synth enters, sweeping everything away from the listener in those final seconds.
The instrumental complexities of Tranquilizer show Oneohtrix Point Never’s path from those days over a decade ago. From mulchy but otherworldly soundscapes, to that epiphanic early-2010 period through the poppier recent releases. This feels like the near-perfect middle of this trifecta, possibly due to its skewing back to the halcyon days of the jewel that is Replica.
Technology will always consist of complex layered systems, from the past and on into the future. The human imprint further deepens these complexities. Parts of us exist in computer systems, whether that’s corrupted images of us in our digital trash or the worringly imperceptible fragments of ourselves in AI-generated images. Lopatin inverts this. The sample CD is given new life within the minds of those who remember those times or long to know them better. No matter the technological zeitgeist, be it past or present, Oneohtrix Point Never captures the impermanence of data and ourselves.
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