Oneohtrix Point Never with Freeka Tet

Daniel Lopatin—who will mark 20 years of records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never in 2007—is one of the most important American artists of this young century. His beautiful but brittle opuses have increasingly explored the information-and-opinion overload of modern life, especially the way we invest our digital lives with so much meaning while knowing that it could all vanish with a few errant keyboard clicks or at the whim of some tech oligarch. In fact, Lopatin’s brilliant 2025 album, Tranquilizer, stemmed from the disappearance and sudden reappearance of a stockpile of sample CDs from the Internet Archive that he had bookmarked. He took its resurrection as an invitation to give it a new life, sampling its parts into a vertiginous but somehow soothing universe of chiming bells and sighing flutes and babbling digital brooks, all broken by static glitches and sighing drones, jump-cuts between reality and oblivion. “It is really the most satisfying thing you could do,” he once said, “to just put a little scratch in something that has the arrogance of knowing what it is.”

This operating aesthetic may seem to make Lopatin an unlikely pop producer, but he has now made multiple records with The Weeknd, plus tracks with FKA twigs and Charli XCX. Some of it is, of course, Lopatin’s uncanny sense of sound design, but it also stems from the modern honesty of his work, the way he is reflecting the world not as he wishes it were but the way it actually feels. Like so much of Oneohtrix Point Never’s output, Tranquilizer is an unsettling and disorienting portrait of the present that somehow also seems reassuring, Lopatin acknowledging and sharing in the difficulty that we all face. “I more or less love love,” he has said, “and I want to believe that a lot of what’s happening in my work is redemption. I care about music as a stand-in for my soul.” Onstage, Lopatin brings these heady concepts back to earth, emphasizing in real time the majesty and power of these pieces through an engrossing show. Oneohtrix Point Never sets have been rare stateside events in recent years; Big Ears 2027 is thrilled to host one, especially including acclaimed visual artist Freeka Tet.