Daniel Lopatin, the musican and film composer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, has an origin story, one he seems slightly amused to remember in such detail.
It takes place in an outer Boston suburb sometime in the mid-’80s, when his father, a struggling Russian-Jewish immigrant who entertained at supper clubs (among other jobs), needed to buy a synthesizer. A drummer friend found one on deep discount for him: a Roland Juno-60, the same model heard on a-ha’s bouncy “Take on Me.”
Lopatin’s dad had something more pragmatic in mind. He created a makeshift carrying strap out of belts and kept the keyboard in the original box in the basement in between gigs.
“He used it essentially for what you’d imagine: these little Russian songs, accordion sounds and organ sounds and all that kind of stuff,” Lopatin, 43, says via Zoom from Electric Lady Studios, the mythic recording house in New York’s Greenwich Village.
“And of course it was just this object of fascination for me because I’d go down there and it was a gadget. It was a gizmo and it had lights and levers. And then a little bit later, it goes from a pure object of enchantment to: Oh, I can make some crazy space sounds with this.”
Lopatin has since evolved from crazy space sounds (not by much, thankfully, nor from his boyish enthusiasm) over two decades of acclaimed releases — first on self-produced cassettes and CDs, then for a major label, Warp, collaborating with the Weeknd, Iggy Pop and David Byrne along the way. His bubbling synth creations have been associated with so many microgenres, including hypnagogic pop, vaporwave and plunderphonic, that he’s come to invent some of his own, like his slowed-down, mantra-adjacent “eccojams.”
Timothée Chalamet in the movie “Marty Supreme.”
(A24)
A newish frontier for Lopatin has been film scoring, chiefly for the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny. Those manic rushes of major-chord euphoria in their hyperventilating crime movies “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” are by Lopatin. In theaters Dec. 25, “Marty Supreme,” the robustly confident latest from director Josh Safdie (going solo), is a conceptual breakthough for the composer: a forward-in-the-mix explosion of color and emotion that competes with Timothée Chalamet’s ping-pong virtuoso for main character status.
“They felt like scores or compositions for films that didn’t exist,” says Safdie, 41, on a video call from New York, about Lopatin’s albums, which, he says, changed his perception of how movie scoring could work. “His music felt like it had things to say. It had philosophies behind it.”
Nostalgia plays a significant part in what Lopatin does: a love of squelchy electronic sounds, chime patches and drones that trigger an unexplained comfort. (He’s an elder millennial, more like an Xennial.) A doting Duran Duran-loving sister helped, as did his father’s jazz fusion cassettes. He grew up during a decade of synth wizards: Jan Hammer on TV every week with “Miami Vice,” Vangelis and Giorgio Moroder winning Oscars.
But Lopatin is quick to take our conversation to a deeper level, invoking the ghostly idea — originally articulated by Jacques Derrida — of “hauntology” and cultural trash remixed into treasure.
“There’s a rich and vast tradition of reappropriating ugly things and taking them back and making them beautiful again and salvaging things from the dumpster,” he says. “I think it’s basically about looking at your environment, including the stuff that’s meant to just be there fast and cheap and then disappear, and be the type of person for whom that long-tail stuff is actually fascinating. I was always drawn to that.”
“I don’t have a score until I’m really in touch with the essence of the film, poetically, and then the armature of the score,” Lopatin says. “The decisions I make all have to be in concert with the soul of the film. And if I don’t have that, I don’t have a score.”
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
In the case of “Marty Supreme,” set in the early 1950s, that means a radical use of electronica: sequenced beats, zinging harps and treated choir voices. It’s very much Lopatin’s “Chariots of Fire.” Some moments would work perfectly as the climax of a Rocky movie (“We went full Bill Conti for a while, then we pulled back,” he says). Others have the expressive tenderness of a Tangerine Dream-scored fantasy like “Risky Business.”
For Safdie, that process entails going to a vulnerable place with his composer, lunging for the feelings as best he can. He gives me a taste.
“I’ll say: ‘The feeling of this piece is intoxication, it’s cosmic. You’re entering into a world — you’re basically on a spaceship and you’re going to a new place but that place is beautiful and it’s full of life,’” he says, smiling. “Those are the things we talk about. And then Dan is really good at interpreting feelings through melody. He’s kind of a melody master.”
That wasn’t initially apparent to Lopatin himself. He considered a more traditional approach at a film school.
“I wanted to go to [NYU’s] Tisch and go to the program — dramatic writing and be a screenwriter,” he recalls. “I made all kinds of little janky movies and edited them on two VHS machines and did all of that. And I don’t know how great I was at those things. I really should have just stuck with music from the get-go, but I didn’t want to. I was bored.”
A graduate program in archival science at Pratt helped him gather focus, while turning him on to the infinite history of sound data and cataloguing. He may be the only musical director of a Super Bowl halftime band (for the Weeknd in 2021) who originally wanted to be a librarian.
By the time Lopatin was reading the “Marty Supreme” script — on a flight to Los Angeles in 2023 — he and Safdie were texting in an emoji-laden shorthand that they developed over years of closeness. “I bought the Wi-Fi for $10,” he cracks. “I told him, ‘The film is about the birth of things, the birth of an idea, the birth of a racket but also the birth of a racket, like a hustle. Two different kinds of rackets.”
“His music felt like it had things to say,” says director Josh Safdie of Lopatin’s releases. “It had philosophies behind it.”
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
Lopatin finds this kind of creative splashing around essential. “It’s like we talk in these weird tones and gestures towards the poetry of the thing,” he says. “I don’t have a score until I’m really in touch with the essence of the film, poetically, and then the armature of the score. The decisions I make all have to be in concert with the soul of the film. And if I don’t have that, I don’t have a score.”
Informing the music was a huge Spotify playlist, culled by Safdie over years. “I think it was called ‘Score Supreme,’” Lopatin recalls. “So many pieces of music, a vast world of sound that he was working from, and I never really pressed him on it because I didn’t think he knew yet.” The tracks included everything from New Order, Tears for Fears and Peter Gabriel’s robotic-sounding “I Have the Touch” to Fats Domino and New Age material like Constance Demby.
“I think that’s what makes it so fun because we’re really open to this idea of time being a little bit malleable, a little bit gelatinous,” Lopatin says. “And I don’t think we really knew until we were about halfway through that process that — oh my God, the score is alive and it’s ticking and it’s doing things.”
Wrestling the score into shape took 10 weeks of daily work, by Safdie’s estimation, an unusually long commitment for a director with other post-production duties and a young family. He insisted on renting a tiny studio space in Manhattan, where they could both hole up, hang some posters for inspiration and try out sounds for hours on end. It sounds like the opposite of a men’s retreat, one that results in a soundscape.
“That’s the kind of guy Josh is,” says Lopatin. “He really loves to be in the soup in every aspect of the film, every department but especially the score. To him, it’s almost spiritual. We’re preparing this thing to set sail and it’s a very special period for him. I couldn’t deprive him of that. So essentially I was staying at my girlfriend’s place in Queens and we were working out of a 7-by-8 editing room in midtown. Also Sarah, his wife, was pregnant and gave birth during the creation of the score.”
It’s a process they’ve done since “Good Time,” when it was at a loft in a factory that’s since burned down, one with rats and no windows. “There was a guy who was recording — I think he was maybe even recording our sessions from the outside?” the director says. “There was no insulation and it was intense.”
What exactly are they doing? Trying out mixes, considering hundreds of audio samples, scooping out tonal frequencies, splicing together temporary music cues, listening and listening again. Lopatin needed persuading, so Safdie wrote him a letter.
“I remember writing this long letter to convince him to do it and I was like: More than anything, Dan, this is an excuse for me to be with my best friend,” Safdie says. “We’ll spend two hours talking about something that happened to us when we were 15 years old, some girl that made us feel a certain way, and then a bout of inspiration happens. So I’m lucky to be able to be in this position.”
Lopatin remembers the experience vividly.
“There are people walking past us all the time, spying and looking in,” he says. “We had covered the walls with gigantic black-and-white images, real life of photos of people that had inspired the characters in the film, gigantic images of people in shtetls and hustlers and all this kind of stuff. And we were in this little cube working on this thing.”
“And at first I was really like, ‘Josh, I don’t know,’” the musician continues, candidly. Hadn’t they earned a little comfort? This was a December prestige title for A24 starring Chalamet.
“He goes, ‘No, we’ve never earned it,” Lopatin says, laughing. “‘We always start from ground zero.’ And of course, once we had a score and we felt that we had something we were very proud of, we spoiled ourselves a little bit by mixing it at Electric Lady. But up until that moment it’s like you’ve got nothing. That’s a really important thing that Josh instills in me. We have to be under duress on some level because our character is.”
The composer is coming around to an idea that’s the opposite of self-imposed studio isolation. Maybe it’s a happier Daniel Lopatin. “I feel a level of satisfaction, a completeness as a human being, when I’m being surprised and enraptured with somebody else’s vision of the world,” he says. “That seems to me much more interesting at this juncture of my life.”
He’ll keep his ears open for the next movie. And when he’s ready, his dad’s Juno-60 will be waiting for him.
