Oneohtrix Point Never calls himself an “amateur musician” but a “professional recordist”
“Nobody at a party wants to hear me sit down and start improvising, and doing some weird minimalist paradiddles that become some forlorn melody.”
Oneohtrix Point Never
In a new interview, Daniel Lopatin – better known as Oneohtrix Point Never – reveals why he considers himself a “professional recordist” but an “amateur musician”.
Speaking with Luke Thomas of The Creative Independent, the Brooklyn-based artist says: “I remember sometime early on when I was really looking around, and saying, ‘Well, what are some of my contemporaries, or some of the people I respect, saying about these types of things?’ I remember reading an interview with Thurston Moore [of Sonic Youth]. He said, ‘I’m not a musician. I prefer not to be called that.’”
According to Oneohtrix Point Never, “A musician is someone who – and this is me talking, not Thurston – if we were having a cocktail party, and there was a piano in the room, you’d say, ‘Oh, Dan, why don’t you play us in Scott Joplin, or something?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, no problem.’ I’d put my drink down, and we’d have a great time, and I’d play whatever. I could do that… if I was a musician, and I’m not.”
“Nobody at a party wants to hear me sit down and start improvising, and doing some weird minimalist paradiddles that become some forlorn melody,” he adds. “In that sense, I’m just feeling my way through the instrument in an intuitive way – and an embarrassing way, frankly.”
“Much of what I do is as a person interested in ideas, interested in the technology of music, and interested in the possibility to express something without traditional means, which I don’t have.”
As a kid, Oneohtrix Point Never used to be a “bad piano student”, though he was admittedly “exposed to a lot of music tradition with everyone in my family playing on the upright piano.”
“I am a person who really, really appreciates ideas around music and the story of music, but I don’t consider myself to be necessarily part of a tradition, unless we’re talking about maybe the tradition of computer music, and that’s where I find myself – in that lineage, that story of 20th century modern electroacoustic music. That’s the tradition I think I could be part of,” he says.
