Oneohtrix Point Never

There’s an idea that ambient music is supposed to soothe, spackling in the periphery of our attention with calm, lapping waves. Though ambient is as good and inept a descriptor as any for Brooklyn producer Daniel Lopatin’s mercurial music, that’s not really what it does. Tracks like “Describing Bodies,” recorded last year under his Oneohtrix Point Never alias, are still but not tranquil. They’re less wallpaper, more the sound of the walls creeping in on you. This is heavy ambient, mood music for the willfully tense.

Still, that doesn’t sum it up very well, either. OPN’s celebrated 2010 record, Returnal, never stays in the same place for two straight songs. It starts with industrial noise, as if the sound of hail pelting tin is fed through a distorted amp. That clears up shortly, leaving a static reflecting pond of sustained tone, which in turn segues into something more restless, more kinetically ominous. The title track, with its digitally smeared vocals and crisp synth notes, could be post-human dance music like The Knife make, if it was smooth instead of sharp. That one worked even better when reworked as a stark piano ballad for Antony Hegarty, though, so all bets are basically off.

Oneohtrix Point Never isn’t likely to be any easier to pin down live. Alien Vangelis-scoring-Blade Runner synths, sampled pan flutes, aggressively distorted and delayed vocals, and krautrock marathons will all likely show up somewhere in his set (but not necessarily in that order). Expect big washes of pure sound morphing into surprising shapes, blossoming into unforeseen textures. With Lopatin, one of the most ineffably odd producers working in the current underground, it’s all about showing up to be delighted by the myriad ways music might choose to confuse. —Jeff Klingman