Memory Of Music
Words: Henry Bruce Jones
Images: Freeka Tet, Joseph Buscarello
6191 words, 00:20:38
Back in 2016, while exiting customs at the El Paso International Airport in Texas, Freeka Tet was detained and placed in custody at an ICE Detention Facility for one month. Due to what the audiovisual artist and experimental stage performer would later find out was an administrative error, his passport was confiscated and within half an hour Tet went from returning home from a road trip across Texas to sharing a cell with 80 people and eating breakfast with members of the MS-13 cartel. He was still wearing his pajamas when he was taken into custody. “My first memory, probably four hours after being processed and being sent to the cell, was seeing a guy killing a rattlesnake, fucking hammering it with a plastic trash bin in the middle of the cell,” Tet recalls. “That was the vibe.”
A year prior, Daniel Lopatin had released Garden Of Delete, a definitive record, both sonically and conceptually, for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never. The abrasive mood swing of cyberdrone and hypergrunge found Lopatin reckoning with the extremities of adolescence, twisting the music of an angsty youth - nu metal, tooth decay pop production, alternative rock and extreme computer music - into mutant forms abject enough to address the formative trauma of puberty. It was an album that soundtracked much of Tet’s trip through Texas and one song in particular, ‘Animals,’ would be the final song he would hear before he was arrested. “There was no music in jail,” Tet explains, “so it was what I had stuck in my head, the only fresh memory of music.” As what the artist expected to be a day behind bars stretched into weeks, the surreal nihilism of the track’s account of a couple finding the bleak humour in watching zoo animals and imagining humans caged in a similar kind of captivity became an unexpected metaphor for the horrors of the US immigration prison industrial complex. “We sit on the side / And observe all the animals / I try not to laugh / ‘Cause I know / It’s the end of us.”
Though only meeting for the first time to work together on music videos for Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2023 album Again, the similarities between Freeka Tet and Daniel Lopatin’s embryonic experiences with music are striking. While Tet grew up in a tiny town near Bordeaux and Lopatin’s emigrant parents fled the Soviet Union to take up residence in Wayland, Massachusetts, both came up on similar cultural diets. Both fostered a penchant for sci-fi, are fascinated by the practical effects of John Carpenter and are obsessed with David Lynch. Both found their gateways into music through their local noise scenes, experiences that continue to serve as major influences on their work to this day. Both preserve a thirst for experimentation and confrontation as central tenets of their practices, yet have always nurtured more populist tastes, poised in an oscillation between high and low culture that has had just as important an impact on their work. Freeka Tet went from DIY tattoos and listening to Mr Bungle to performing alongside Amnesia Scanner and doing stage design for Childish Gambino, while Oneohtrix Point Never’s ascendency from underground noise virtuoso to film composer du jour, chief creative confidant of one Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye and musical director of the Super Bowl remains one of contemporary experimental music’s most direct lines to mainstream pop culture.
One essential inspiration for both artists is a producer who flourished in the narcotic fluidity between an experimental approach to sound and the dopamine of mainstream pop and hip hop: Houston legend DJ Screw. His visionary chopped and screwed productions would shape both Tet’s bootleg approach to plunderphonics, AV sampling and video collage and Lopatin’s own tripped out compositional innovation, the eccojam. In a 2015 interview with Emilie Friedlander for Vice around the release of Garden Of Delete, Lopatin describes the eccojam as “a very simple exercise where I just take music I like, I loop up a segment, slow it down, and put a bunch of echo on it—just to placate my desire to hear things I like without things I don’t.” Where DJ Screw slowed down rap to the humid crawl of the deep South, Lopatin petrifies some of the most irresistible shards of 20th century pop music in cloudy silicon, looping his productions around snatches of lyrics, as though trying and failing to remember songs heard playing on the radio. By extracting the adolescent affect induced by these songs he is able to distill them down into single potent phrases before cutting them with enough tape delay, pitch shifting and phaser effects to hone them into something new and hypnotic.
Across his landmark 2010 mixtape, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, Lopatin chops and slows loops out of Toto’s ‘Africa,’ JoJo’s ‘Too Little, Too Late’ and Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady In Red,’ before soldering together these fragments of memory into an abstract narrative of love (“hurry boy she’s waiting there for you”), loss (“be real, it doesn’t matter anyway, you know it’s just too little too late”) and loneliness (“there’s nobody here”). Lopatin’s eccojams made a major impression on Freeka Tet, who appreciated Lopatin’s method of sampling for the deference it shows towards the sample itself. “Reproducing Screw, or an eccojam, is really easy technically, but your mind is the most important part,” he notes. “The technique is not going to be as interesting as what you are actually sampling.” For Lopatin, eccojams serve as both homage and memorial, a living monument to the most important music of his past and a formal reification of music’s unparalleled capacity to evoke highly specific and emotional memories. Indeed, for those who have been listening to Oneohtrix Point Never since Betrayed in the Octagon, it is almost surprising that it has taken Lopatin ten studio albums to title a track ‘Memories of Music,’ as the recreation of the experience of hearing certain kinds of music during his youth has been one of the producer and composer’s most consistent artistic exercises.
However, rather than simply subversive experiments in nostalgia, Lopatin’s focus on his own memory of music points to something more fundamental. Rather than simply the subject matter of endless music forums, message boards and YouTube comments sections, the unique relationship between music and memory might actually help us understand how memory works in the first place. In their paper ‘Spontaneous Mental Replay Of Music Improves Memory For Musical Sequence Knowledge,’ neuroscientists Benjamin M. Kubit and Petr Janot ask: “why is music effective at evoking memories from one’s past?” Focusing on the cognitive phenomena of earworms, or what they describe as ‘involuntary musical imagery (INMI),’ they identify “a memory-consolidation role” for pieces of music that get stuck in your head, which they note as “a naturally occurring form of spontaneous cognition” and “a virtually unavoidable consequence of hearing music.” According to Kubit & Janot, INMI are “predominantly experienced during periods of low cognitive demand associated with mind-wandering episodes,” like staring stoned at the ceiling of your bedroom, or cruising down the Texas Interstate. By simulating these conditions in a lab setting and examining the memory phenomena of earworms, Kubit and Janot assert that INMI serve as evidence that “spontaneous thoughts concerning recent events, though often fleeting, are not simply passive experiences but often reflect ongoing memory processes that influence future behaviour.”
Listen:
Oneohtrix Point Never ˇ
‘Animals’
This active role of memory resonates with Tet’s recollection of ‘Animals’ during his incarceration, falsely imprisoned in a Kafka-esque illumination of the obscenity of American border bureaucracy. His memory of the song persisted through boredom and despondency, an echo of a time before his imprisonment that provided greater definition to the mental image of what life could be like afterwards. Faced with a total absence of music, even its memory proves powerful enough to keep you going. Lopatin’s eccojams take this concept and stretch it to breaking point. In his relentless repetition of this involuntary musical imagery, earworms become degraded, like a frayed VHS tape becoming chewed up inside its player. By positioning INMI as the conceit around which each eccojam orbits, Lopatin complicates their evocative qualities, negating the phenomena as a prompt for spontaneous cognition by repurposing an unavoidable consequence as a composition’s raison d’être. If the spontaneous thoughts triggered by music are a symptom of the making of memory, what happens when this process is eroded? In addition to consolidating memory, eccojams investigate music’s capacity to recast it within a different context, to change its particularities, or even, in extreme cases, to contort memory into something unrecognizable.
Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 is credited by many to be the precursor to vaporwave, another microgenre of electronic music preoccupied with music’s relationship to memory. Like eccojams, vaporwave renders novel sampling techniques as vehicles for the reappraisal of the samples themselves. However, where Lopatin seeks to pry the most precious gems from the gilt forms of 20th century pop music, vaporwave is more interested in the waste of its excess. Similarly influenced by DJ Screw, vaporwave pioneer Ramona Langley (Vektroid, Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions) piped purgatorial elevator muzak and liminal commercial jingles around screwed pop standards, as though programming a soothing in-store radio station for an infinite mall at the end of history. Seeking to reframe the pop music of the ‘80s and ‘90s as the lurid soundtrack to materialism, consumerism and overconsumption, vaporwave artists embody a skepticism of “capitalism’s promise to redeem us in the name of material goods and of the nostalgia that hangs over an era obsessed with the clichés of history,” as Grafton Tanner describes in his book Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. “Vaporwave spits in the face of late capitalism and mocks the very methods used to sell us the things we don’t need,” Tanner continues, “all while problematizing our understanding of history.”
Just as eccojams use loops and reverb to concentrate and extrude the emotional potency of pop music, vaporwave chops and screws these forms into the sounds of their own commodification, drawing attention to the opioid-dulled pleasantness of our consumption of them. In this way, vaporwave stages how our memories, both cultural and personal, can be addled by the conditions of our past experience. Lopatin would address this idea head on with the looping CD skips of his 2011 album Replica, which took the approach to sampling devised for his eccojams and used it to create rippling textures out of scraps of ‘80s and ‘90s television commercials. As though taking the conceptual project of vaporwave to its most extreme conclusion, Lopatin is able to coax emotional complexity from a latticework of repurposed 20th century commercial sound. “Vaporwave’s act of reframing our history, of allowing us to revisit the corporate music of previous decades and to reevaluate the emotional appeal…accomplishes something contemporary music rarely does,” asserts Tanner. “It invites us to react emotionally to a genre of music that has subversive potential.” While the emotions each illicit may differ, the subversive potential shared by vaporwave and eccojams is the ability to spotlight the coercive, even sinister qualities of the very thing that makes this music so seductive.
By looping only the parts of these songs that he wants to hear, Lopatin simulates the insular experience of a teenager compulsively listening to the same song on repeat in their bedroom. This is both intimate and jarring, situating the listener as voyeur, catching a glimpse of Lopatin’s intimate relationship with these songs as though heard through thin walls. Rather than music that is as ignorable as it is interesting, eccojams are as eerie as they are ecstatic, as uncomfortable as they are irresistible. “In general, looping stuff and listening to it forever is very annoying, it’s some form of torture for most people,” says Tet. “But when it works it actually can be the opposite. It’s addictive.” Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 was released in 2010, the same year that Instagram was launched. In an uncanny prefiguring of the TikTok ‘For You’ page and the Instagram Reel, Lopatin’s conceit of compulsively looping only the shortest, most potent distillations of pop music resonates with the infinite scroll of dopamine farm social media algorithms. Grafton Tanner also identifies this collapse of the artist into algorithm in the looping forms of vaporwave. “Repetition means mechanical processes are underway,” he asserts. “For the human, repetition spells a loss of humanity in favor of the machine.”
Faced with a total absence of music, even its memory proves powerful enough to keep you going. Lopatin’s eccojams take this concept and stretch it to breaking point.
“Perhaps for humans, we fear not the mechanization and loss of control so much as the fear of becoming Frankenstein’s monster,” submits Tanner. “A babbling corpse, hollow yet able to run amok with machinelike skill.” In the opening moments of Freeka Tet’s video for ‘A Barely Lit Path’, which follows two life size dummies strapped into a car as they hurtle through an approximation of the star gate from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the camera rests on a lavishly bound copy of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. The book, written in 1872, details the discovery of the titular Erewhon, a fictional country based on Butler’s own experiences working as a sheep farmer in New Zealand. Sending up Victorian society and thought through its satire of the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the novel is notable for its early exploration of the concept of artificial intelligence. Across three chapters titled ‘The Book of the Machines,’ the novel’s narrator, Higgs, recounts his translation of fragments of text recovered from the city of Unreason, the setting of the collapse of a highly advanced automated civilization in a revolution against the proliferation of self-reproducing machines.
The anxiety captured in these fragments reads, perhaps unsurprisingly, as extremely familiar. “Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?” asks one. This predates the earliest discussions of technological singularity by mathematician John von Neumann, who speculated on technological growth spiralling out of human control, by decades, as well as Alan Turing’s ideas about machine intelligence becoming indistinguishable from that of a human, by nearly a century. Moreover, Butler’s speculative setting probes at questions about the nature of consciousness itself. Another fragment asks: “But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything?” This anxiety around what constitutes intelligence is another theme Lopatin has engaged with throughout his Oneohtrix Point Never discography. Most memorably MYRIAD, the ambitious installation concert series developed out of his album Age Of, centered around a network of AIs, or “Limitless Living Informational Intelligence,” at the end of time, attempting to recreate the cultural ages of man from averages taken of the recorded creative output of humankind.
Rather than diminish the creative capacity of artificial intelligence, MYRIAD pays homage to the profound strangeness of human creation, simultaneously showcasing the fallibility of human beings and the impossible complexity of mapping this fallibility by machines. Butler’s own investigation into the nature of this imperfect intelligence reverberates in the lyrics of ‘A Barely Lit Path’: “If I empty my mind / Do I scoop out my skull? / What gifts would I find?” Tet’s video serves as a provocation of this sentiment, pulling close focus on two hollow figures going through the accelerated motions of an intense break up. “The romance is in little gestures,” he explains. “Everybody thinks that they’re crash dummies, but they’re not. They’re CPR dolls.” Tasked with imbuing inanimate mannequins with emotion, posed for eternity in rigor mortis to stare blankly through expressionless death masks, Tet was drawn to the ontological resonance shared between the creative challenge, Lopatin’s music and Butler’s writing. “The design of the most famous adult CPR dummy, the Mini Anne, was based on a French woman that drowned in the 19th century in Paris,” he explains. “Because of the actual object, technically, this woman is the most kissed woman on the planet. The emotion of this made me feel like she was the perfect face for it.”
Working in response to a break up of his own, Tet set about simulating the most complex emotions in the simplest way possible. “All the shots that look like CGI, like the hands moving, are literally just an aquarium tube in plastic gloves,” he reveals. “There’s no technology, but it looks like the most technological thing you can find. The inflation, all this pulsating and breathing, is like a human. When I’m working with Dan it’s always the same thing, I’m trying to pull out the most human thing I can.” In the absence of the human, even the illusion of sentience remains affecting. It’s this tension that Freeka Tet and Oneohtrix point Never capture in Again², the live audiovisual puppet show developed in support of Again. “I wanted to do a show where there’s nothing,” Tet describes. “Instead of crazy light everywhere it’s very small and intimate, but filmed to feel big on the screen. I like the idea of having this contrast of a single person on stage with a tiny little box, but when you look at the screen, it looks like the biggest show you’ve ever seen.” Drawing on material from throughout Lopatin’s discography and incorporating characters from across the Oneohtrix Point Never cinematic universe, Again² is a painstaking and personal look back over more than 15 years of music.
Building on top of the shimmering holograms of the AV show put together by stalwart OPN co-conspirator Nate Boyce for their Rebuild shows, which similarly saw the pair reinterpreting tracks from Lopitan’s back catalog, Tet devised a way to represent this physically. His initial idea was to attempt to recreate the desk from Lopatin’s teenage bedroom, taking inspiration from the otaku keyboards featured in Jon Rafman’s now legendary visual for ‘Still Life (Betamale)’. Another idea that was shelved was what Tet describes as a “cut out choir of all the different characters that have existed in the OPN world,” which would have seen Online Ceramics creating stickers of entities featured in Oneohtrix Point Never artwork and videos that Tet would then use an AR app to animate. Even Ecco The Dolphin would have made an appearance. Finally, taking visual cues from the geometric room taken from the cover art of Lopatin’s Warp debut R Plus Seven, itself a still from a 1982 experimental film by Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel, Tet became obsessed with idea of containing Lopatin’s entire world within a small box. Recreating the festival stages for which Tet was used to making visuals for in miniature, it became clear that Lopatin’s performance would have to shrink down with it.
Iterating on his work with animatronics for Amnesia Scanner, Tet enlisted the help of puppeteer Hobey Ford to create four tiny puppet bodies with an entire cast of attachable head pieces, to weave the illusion of a vast cosmology of characters. “Obviously one character is Dan, because I wanted that feeling of scale,” recalls Tet. “The second character was probably the CPR doll, because we had just made the video for ‘A Barely Lit Path’. Then the third one was the car salesman from ‘We’ll Take It’.” Using a complex system of rods, intricately rigged cameras, lights, video projectors, triggers and pedals that require both of the performer’s hands and occasionally their feet to operate, Tet recreates Lopatin’s live performance in miniature, projecting grand spectacle from the most intimate gestures. Casting back to both childhood memories of puppet shows and the historical traditions of puppetry, Tet finds the perfect medium for performing memory. Speaking on the New Models podcast, strategist Jay Springett notes that Taiwanese puppeteers don’t have a word for performance, in the sense of presenting a role or piece of music to an audience. “You don’t play a character or perform a character,” he specifies. “Instead you would say you were animating a character, that you were bringing it to life.”
This kind of animation is central to the themes of Again, which uses the sentimentality of post rock, described by Lopatin in his short lived NTS program ‘Cool Protrusions’ as “an inward-facing, introverted, humble kind of eclectic approach to a dying art form,” as a way to come to terms with the formal aspects of a genre he has fallen out of love with. Rather than attempt the impossible and perform post rock as the young man that once obsessed over it, Lopatin animates his old character, bringing new lifeforce to old memories. If Again instrumentalizes the post rock jam as a way to animate a younger self with questionable music tastes, Again² utilizes puppetry to animate older versions of Oneohtrix Point Never - as musical project, as persona and as conceptual world. Lopatin’s own experience of Oneohtrix Point Never is decentered, animating objects that are also past selves, made subjects by an audience in a recursive structure that mimics the loop of an eccojam. This erosion of the boundaries between the subject and the object, between the human and the mechanical, is addressed by Butler in Erewhon. “A machine is merely a supplementary limb,” the inhabitants of Unreason assert, “this is the be all and end all of machinery.”
“We do not use our own limbs other than as machines,” they contend, “a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.” Like an aquarium tube inflating a CPR dummy, Tet seeks to use the most rudimentary technology to animate the most emotionally complex characters. Every nod of a miniature head, shred of a miniature guitar and twist of a miniature knob provides a view of a performance more intimate for its mechanization, his technical skill the conduit for the life force required to bring the show to life. In this way, Again² illuminates what 19th century German dramatist and poet Heinrich von Kleist describes as “the path taken by the soul of the dancer” in his 1810 text ‘On the Marionette Theatre.’ The text relates a conversation between Kleist and an old friend, a dancer at a local theatre who Kleist remarks has been seen on a number of occasions in the audience at a travelling puppet show. Struck by the graceful movements of the marionettes and their operators, the dancer impresses upon Kleist that, far from being “something which can be done entirely without feeling,” as Kleist suspects, the intricate movements and positions required from the skilled puppeteer require extreme sensitivity.
“He doubted if this could be found unless the operator can transpose himself into the centre of gravity of the marionette,” writes Kleist. “In other words, the operator dances.” Doubling down, the dancer insists that the “last trace of human volition could be removed from the marionettes and their dance transferred entirely to the realm of mechanical forces,” gesturing towards an entirely automated form of dance that, if crafted to his precise specifications, would be something that “neither he nor any other skilled dancer of his time…could equal.” Here we are confronted with the reality that Freeka Tet’s AV puppetry might not simply serve as a captivating medium for a Oneohtrix Point Never performance but might in fact represent a more powerful live representation of the music of Daniel Lopatin than the man himself could ever manage. According to the dancer of Keist’s text: “as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity.”
“Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness,” the dancer of Kleist’s text concludes. “That is, in a puppet or in a god.” Tet is aware of the endless potential of the puppet show, of the grace and humanity that is achievable with these machines. “When I operate Dan’s puppet, I mimic what he’s doing on stage when he’s playing an instrument,” he explains. “My dream was to remake the miniature stage within the box itself, so when he’s playing there is a smaller version of me, with a very, very small puppet, that I could film in macro to give the impression that it actually never stops, that it’s infinite.” It’s perhaps being confronted by this infinite potential, as the dancer in Kleist’s text was, that the performer might be convinced of their transformation into puppet, to see more clearly the kind of life force with which their roles are animated. Rather than invoking fear of the babbling corpse and its machinelike skill, Freeka Tet subversively challenges our willingness to become one with the machine and our embrace of mechanization by questioning what we really mean when we talk about control.
One of the key inspirations informing Tet’s vision of the Again² live show was Inside, a 2016 game from publisher Playdead that puts the player in control of a young boy navigating a ruined world ruled over by a technologically advanced authoritarian regime, which controls its subjects by the industrialised use of mass mind control. During the game’s twist ending it is revealed that while you, the player, had assumed control of the boy for the entirety of the game, his tireless progress was itself the product of mind control, in this instance by a telekinetic, Cronenbergian blob of flesh being held captive for study in a high security facility. Using the boy to stage a desperate escape, the blob smashes through the glass of its tank and rolls to freedom, coming to rest in a green, sunlit field. Yet, in a secret fourth wall dismantling ending, the player controls the boy as he descends into a hidden bunker, within which we are given the choice to disconnect the power supply from a mysterious machine, severing the connection between the player and the protagonist, ending the game for good. “You have a controller, but who is controlling who?” asks Tet. “Is the game actually controlling you?”
“I was thinking a lot about Inside when I was making the puppets,” explains Tet. “I was supposed to control an audience somehow, their emotions and the way they react. When you do things live everything changes. We’re not robots.” Not only are audiences not robots, they don’t want the artists they watch to be either. Widespread public and institutional backlash against the use of generative AI in visual art and music is evidence of this, but even on the smallest scale, while social media feeds might be irresistible, the second we catch ourselves pulled into the undertow of the algorithm paranoia creeps in. Even these feelings are present among the citizens of Unreason in Butler’s Erewhon. “I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present,” states one. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?” Despite this, in the 150 years since Butler wrote these words, with the development of AGI closer than ever, while technological acceleration has reached terminal velocity, our fear of it has been subdued by the sheer convenience of its products.
Our willingness to introduce AI into almost every aspect of our personal and public life only serves to underline our unremitting readiness to accept mechanization and surrender control to the machine, yet our reluctance to recognise this same machine’s capacity for creativity lies at the root of our fear of the babbling corpse. If we scorn AI art and refuse to identify with robots, what makes our transformation into puppets more appealing? What are we so scared of hearing from the corpse’s desiccated mouth? When we entirely offload our creative processes to AI we fashion ourselves as the mouthpiece of a machinic creativity, sterile in its mechanical synthesis of form and affect. Yet being confronted with AI generated art and its inherent lack also reminds us of the boundless creative potential of the human mind, a complexity that can be equally unsettling. There is something about the machinery of our own brains and bodies that makes many of us afraid to operate them, so much so that we grow reliant on the supplementary limbs of the technology we surround ourselves with. It’s this impulse that Freeka Tet and Oneohtrix Point Never find so morbidly fascinating.
Listen:
Oneohtrix Point Never ˇ
‘The Body Trail’
When writing the treatment for the ‘Memories of Music’ video, Tet sought to reposition the processes of prompting and generation away from platforms ChatGPT and Midjourney and back within his own brain. Working in collaboration with researchers at the MIT Media Lab, he looked to Dormio, a device that allows users to shape their own dreams. Dormio builds upon the principles of the steel ball technique, a method used by Albert Einstein, Salvador Dali and, most famously, Thomas Edison, which involves napping while holding the titular steel ball over a metal try. As you drift off you lose your grip of the ball and it clatters onto the tray, waking you with a fresh memory of the feverish dreams that accompany hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep. Expanding on the use of this technique as a way to solve complex problems and stimulate lateral thinking, Dormio allows users to record messages that are played as they fall asleep. When the device detects that the user has entered hypnagogia it wakes them, prompting them to describe what they have just experienced. It was with this process that Tet came up with the concept for the video for ‘Memories of Music’.
“It’s like AI prompting straight to your brain,” he enthuses. “I knew what we wanted to talk about, but all the different details came from my dreams.” Though Tet and Lopatin would never get to make the video they wanted to, they would archive the detail generated from this dream incubation in a public folder, released alongside an animatic pairing the song with the text of the written treatment. “Invoking the Platonic ideal— sometimes a concept is the purest form of a creation, but… no one concept rules the roost,” reads the YouTube caption. “Chaos flowers must grow like weeds in an infinitely transforming hypergarden, servicing ALL. So we encourage you to imagine the many different possibilities, which could potentially be in conversation with the final product one day.” There is something uniquely evocative about trawling through the raw materials of a video that was never made, the work’s singular vision cohering in a kind of Lynchian dream logic that could only be plucked from hypnagogia. In Tet’s dreams, Michael McKean would star, Robert Pattinson and Richard D. James would make cameos, high-end audio equipment company McIntosh Labs would sponsor the shoot and the video’s climax would take place at the Eastchester Music Center in New York City.
The experience put Tet’s relationship with technology into perspective. “The technique made me realise that technology is slowing us down and disconnecting us from everything,” he emphasises. “The reality is, the steel ball technique is so much better than wearing any sensor. It has exactly the same purpose, the same result, with no battery, nothing.” What the technological intervention of Dormio underscores is something that we knew all along: that the creative capacity of the human mind is many orders of magnitude more impressive than the complexity of any machine learning algorithm. This is perhaps what we fear the babbling corpse might reveal to us. In his essay ‘Night Shifts: Can Technology Shape Our Dreams?’ for Harper’s, Michael W. Clune reflects on his own experiences with Dormio. What he is most struck by is just how vast and ineffable the creative capacities revealed by the technique are and what this says about the human mind. “This helpless creativity of my mind, this incessant hypnagogic generation of forms and worlds, isn’t like the productions of human artists,” he observes. “Looking at surrealist images by Dalí or even Max Ernst while my vision is still saturated by the shapes and colors of hypnagogia, I’m most taken by the way, in the pictures, creativity has stopped.”
“But the images of hypnagogia never stop,” he continues, “the creativity of the dreaming mind is a transformative force defined by the fact that it can’t be distilled into intelligible sentences, paintable images, tolerable music.” This is the thought that evades control, the things you can’t remember, yet lend colour and texture to your most precious memories and ideas. This is the source of the life force with which we animate the roles we play, a space we don’t understand, that threatens to swallow us in madness if left unchecked. “Direct insight into the relentless creativity of the dreaming brain… can be disturbing,” writes Clune. “It seems to me that creation—the creation of stable, delimited objects—may even involve a kind of struggle against the mind’s ceaseless, devouring creativity. In any case, my encounter with dream creativity inspired at least as much fear as exhilaration.” Clune, Tet and Lopatin understand that, not only is what you can’t remember just as important as what you can, but reaching out to retrieve those memories, to confront what uncontrolled thought really looks like, can be an overwhelming and transformative experience. “It’s you really acknowledging how your body works,” submits Tet. “It’s like a fucking eccojam.”
Hidden in the depths of the ‘Memories of Music’ archive is a YouTube Multiplier link entitled ‘Memories of ECCO 1971’, Freeka Tet’s own eccojam of the track. It feels somewhat inevitable that it makes the perfect candidate for this hypnagogic treatment, the hazy loops of the track’s soft percussive stomp and plaintive guitar peeling away layers to uncover new emotional depths. “With Dan, the feeling comes first,” Tet affirms, identifying the connective tissue between Lopatin’s compulsive technical reinvention and the conceptual density of his sound. It’s this primacy of feeling driving the loops of Lopatin’s eccojams and the other forms of ‘hypnagogic pop’ that they shaped and were shaped by that would become the vehicle for capitalist critique that vaporwave would construct itself as. When David Keenan coined the oft-derided term in his essay ‘Childhood’s End’ in The Wire, he described it as “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory.” What Freeka Tet has produced with his music videos for Lopatin and his AV puppet show is Oneohtrix Point Never refracted through the memory of a memory. His manipulation of involuntary musical imagery conjured from Lopatin’s discography makes it clear that we don’t make memories to make sense of the past, but to help us navigate the terrifying uncertainty of the future.
When asked about what moved Lopatin to write ‘Animals,’ he admits he was driven by fear. “I’d been reading Nick Bostrom’s stuff about artificial intelligence, and in the course of reading that, someone—Nick or some other thinker—suggested a scenario where far more evolved beings than we are would just ignore us, the way we ignore animals and insects,” he told Emilie Friedlander. “We wouldn’t pose a big enough risk to them to deserve eradication. That thought scared me so much—imagining a cyborg ignoring you.” It’s a fear he shares with Samuel Butler, who wrote in Erewhon: “The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for our animal life than the use of any machine, on the strength of which we have increased our numbers, is to our civilisation; it is the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines; but we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.”
When Freeka Tet met Daniel Lopatin for the first time he told him about his memories of ‘Animals’ during his month in prison. How the lyrics had come to narrate his experience in captivity. How Rick Alverson’s video, starring the late Val Kilmer, had become the perfect visual metaphor for his imprisonment. Though Lopatin hadn’t performed the song in years, he reintroduced it into his setlist, ultimately deciding to close out Again² with it. As the artists developed the show, Lopatin resolved to honor Tet’s memory of his music. “Now it’s your song,” Tet recalls him saying, “it should be your puppet on stage.”