When it was time to settle on a musical moniker, Daniel Lopatin chose “Oneohtrix Point Never,” an homage to Boston’s FM radio home for soft rock.
With that in mind, listeners of his 10th album, last year’s “Again,” will be reminded of the modes and methods Lopatin has embraced on past projects that, as a whole, present a thesis on the power and limits of memory and nostalgia, forces that serve as both inspiration and nullification for new ideas.
On “Again,” Lopatin looked back at a period of young adulthood where he was first expanding his range of musical consumption and expanding his mind around the idea of recording solo electronic music. It was the early 2000s, and Lopatin was attending Hampshire College, where he was isolated in rural western Massachusetts but able to take advantage of the “halcyon days” of peer-to-peer file sharing.
“I’m simultaneously in [the sticks], but also getting to experience a ton of music from around the world, some of which I’ve only really ever heard about or read about,” he says via Zoom. “It was just like an amazing period of absorbing things that way.”
The music he shared with close friends during that time continues to influence him: records by Dutch techno producer Legowelt, experimental composers David Behrman and Robert Ashley, William Basinski’s tape-loop masterpiece “The Disintegration Loops.” Whenever Lopatin starts a project, he looks back to the various origin points in his life, searching for inspiration from the source.
“What was the impulse that led me to be really excited about this stuff? What is the feeling? What’s the wellspring of excitement? Not to re-create it, but to meditate on it,” he explains.
“Again” is not the first time Lopatin has begun his process with an assessment of his past lives. “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never,” released in 2020, revolved around “nascent, pre-semiotic speculation of what music is when you’re like 3 years old,” he says. And 2015’s “Garden of Delete” looked back to his pubescent period and the major-label alt-rock he ingested at the time, “without having any choice in the matter.”
Lopatin’s interest in that adolescent period was stoked by his experience opening for Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden in 2014 that often put him face to face with one of his musical forebears: Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor.
“On one hand, the teenager in me is freaking out because you’re like, ‘What the ----, I’m on tour with Nine Inch Nails,’ but I mostly just remember feeling affirmation or confirmation around our musical approaches or the way we saw what makes music extreme or not,” Lopatin recalls.
Not only did his time with Reznor inform what would become “Garden of Delete,” but it also helped push him toward scoring films. At that time, Reznor and collaborator Atticus Ross had won an Oscar for scoring “The Social Network,” while Lopatin had collaborated on the score to “The Bling Ring.” Lopatin has since gone on to soundtrack a pair of films, “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems,” by the Safdie brothers.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants is practical for me,” Lopatin says. “Part of what I do is I stand on their shoulders, and I just let them talk to me, either literally or meditatively, and I build my own thing on top of that.”
April 25 at 8 p.m. at the Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. thehowardtheatre.com. $35-$55.
