Garden of Delete

Following the release of his 2013 album, R Plus Seven, and work on several side projects, Lopatin was unexpectedly invited to support the American alternative rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden on their 2014 joint amphitheater tour as a replacement for the American group Death Grips.[6][7] With the permission of Nine Inch Nails' frontman, Trent Reznor, Lopatin performed half-hour opening sets of self-described "cyberdrone" to surprised and vexed arena rock crowds.[8] The tour reunited him with the grunge music of his teenage years, and prompted him to re-engage with his memories of adolescence and puberty,[6][7] which he described as "pretty traumatic".[9]

OPN opening for Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden on their 2014 arena tour

After completing the tour and returning to Brooklyn, Lopatin rented a small, windowless basement studio and began sketching new material.[10] Wanting to experiment with pop music, he initially conceived Garden of Delete in its untitled form as an album incorporating and manipulating samples of unheard vocal outtakes from singers such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, which he speculated as being "cold-cut ends" and "dollar-fifty-a-pound bullshit". Unable to contact any managers, he chose to "just pretend to be them",[11] and the initial concept was disregarded in favor of new themes of "dealing with puberty and how your pubescent body is essentially the staging area for all this mutation".[12] The project's main inspirations included the video hosting service Vevo, satellite radio stations oriented around heavy metal such as Ozzy's Boneyard and Lithium, and the work of the French philosopher Julia Kristeva, in particular her influential 1980 work Powers of Horror.[9] About the latter, Lopatin explained,

[Kristeva] talks about the abject things that come out that we have desire to see. So the things that we try to contain within us is like this pre-semiotic reality and society is the way we want to present ourselves [...] And yet, when the stuff comes out — like, you sneeze and you kind of want to look at the napkin for a second [...] So I started thinking, that's a good formal constraint, like how do I kind of vaguely represent things that leak or things that are kind of disgusting but still seductive?[13]

Lopatin was additionally inspired by an exhibition by the American visual artist and earlier collaborator Jacob Ciocci that featured a virtual Max/MSP instrument which played minuscule clips from a multitude of amateur metal drummers sourced from YouTube to orient his new music around drums, as his work had previously focused solely on melodies.[6] The isolated recording environment equally encouraged an abrasive and dense sound compared with Oneohtrix Point Never's earlier releases,[7] with Lopatin saying, "I was making pretty aggressive, nihilistic stuff early on and kind of went away from that for a bit. In some ways I feel like I’m back now."[6]

In interviews during the promotional campaign of Garden of Delete, Lopatin said that his intentions were to "make a hyperactive/depressive record"[9] and "conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions".[13] In addition to the "cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and [...] synthesized sounds" of R Plus Seven,[14] the album draws inspiration from metal, top 40 radio, electronic dance music, alternative rock, industrial and trance music.[9][15] The album prominently incorporates digital simulations of guitars like the Chapman Stick and electric guitars played with shredding techniques. It is the first Oneohtrix Point Never album with prominently "sung" vocals, rendered using the software instrument Chipspeech which allowed Lopatin to write lyrics and play them chromatically.[9] Sasha Geffen of Consequence of Sound noted nonetheless that "you only catch them in snippets inside the grotesque mesh of processing Lopatin’s used to filter them".[16] The Fader wrote that "the record, a meticulous collage of mutilated samples and computer-generated voices, careens between uncanny familiarity and total alienness".[7] The release was accompanied by a lyric sheet.[14]

Thump described Garden of Delete as "a guided tour through the producer's own psychological and physical experience of adolescence — filtered through the prism of his free-wheeling and future-gazing production style", writing that "there's beat programming that sounds like heavy metal drum fills on steroids; voices pushed to demonic, pitched extremes; testosterone-fueled guitar licks worthy of Slash himself".[12] AllMusic wrote that Lopatin "uses his music's porous boundaries brilliantly, whether he's fusing molten R&B with death metal's growls and rapid-fire kick drums on the standout "Sticky Drama", crafting dizzying juxtapositions and edits on "I Bite Through It"'s violent melancholy, or naming one of the album's most beautiful ambient pop moments after the child abuse documentary Child of Rage".[17] Scott Wilson of Fact characterized the album as "full of lurid electronic presets that sound like a guitar blasting out of a wall of amplifiers and palm-muted note runs that sound like painstakingly sequenced MIDI, a grotesque, sinewy collection of sounds that evokes the intertwined sensation of curiosity and disgust I felt browsing the horror section of my local video rental store as a child in the early 1990s".[18]

The release of Garden of Delete was preceded by a Internet promotional campaign, which critics described as enigmatic and surreal, devised by Lopatin in collaboration with friends. The album was initially announced in August 2015 via a series of online posts originating from Lopatin's website, including a cryptic PDF letter to his fans, which were gradually followed by further material.[19] The project sketched out a loose fictional backstory involving Lopatin himself, an acne-ridden teenage alien blogger named Ezra, and an imaginary "hypergrunge" band from the 1990s called Kaoss Edge.[14][20] It incorporated websites such as Ezra's supposed 1990s blog and Kaoss Edge's "official" website, fabricated interviews, characterized Twitter accounts and teaser videos. Kaoss Edge's main website contained a repository of MIDI files (many of which were stems from the album), along with a detailed band biography, subpages with fictional elaborations on the band and a fictional discography, all of which contained hyperlinks to web pages for unaffiliated entities and other obscure information scattered around the site to convey a disorienting Web 1.0 environment.[9][14][1]

Lopatin described the campaign as an attempt to "create a world where I can put into motion vague, interesting ideas, and see how they interact with each other", clarifying that "it's not deeply plotted out, more of an ongoing experiment with the concepts floating around in my head".[21] Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork wrote that "the loose, extra-musical narrative developed across a range of apocrypha that orbit the album [...] may all seem, from the outside, like so much masturbatory energy spillage, but dig deep enough, and they all become part of the larger work".[22] The Quietus described the campaign as being more "like getting caught up in some late-night YouTube, Wikipedia rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and ill-advised medical self-diagnoses than a press release for an album, encouraging full submersion in something that was neither fact or fiction but had the quality of being somehow vital and totally necessary at that moment".[23]

The album's first single, "I Bite Through It", was released on September 3, 2015, and was followed later that month with the unlocking of the Kaoss Edge site which had been hinted at on Ezra's blog, with Lopatin encouraging fans to create their own songs from the site's MIDI files.[24] The second single, "Mutant Standard", was released on October 21.[25] "Sticky Drama" was released on November 4, and accompanied by a two-part music video directed by Jon Rafman.[26] Finally, in October 2016, Lopatin premiered a music video for "Animals" directed by Rick Alverson and starring Val Kilmer at UCLA's Hammer Museum exhibition "Ecco: The Videos of Oneohtrix Point Never and Related Works".[27]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.8/10[28]
Metacritic	79/100[29]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[17]
Consequence of Sound	A−[16]
Exclaim!	9/10[30]
The Guardian	[31]
Mojo	[32]
Pitchfork	8.7/10[22]
Q	[33]
Rolling Stone	[34]
Spin	8/10[35]
Vice	A−[36]

Garden of Delete received generally positive reviews from critics. AllMusic's Heather Phares called the album "some of Lopatin's most intellectually engaging music as well as some of his funniest, darkest, and most cathartic".[15] Writing for Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne described the album as "absolutely gripping — strange, moving, hilarious, sometimes pushing the limits of good taste" adding that "this time out, [Lopatin] ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones".[22] In a positive review, the UK magazine The Skinny described Garden of Delete in contrast to Oneohtrix Point Never's previous work as a "seemingly aggressive record; muscular in tone, schizophrenic in delivery, all the while possessing a maniacal grin on its face", calling it "Oneohtrix’s anti-ambient record".[37] Kyle Carney of Exclaim! wrote that the record manages to sound accessible despite its complexities, calling it "a sound collage like no other".[30] Under the Radar called it "a complex beast of shade and mood, and [...] Lopatin's best work yet".[38]

Writing for Consequence, Sasha Geffen called the album "OPN's most emotional work to date and also his most ridiculous". He wrote, "Its tragedy is bound up with its humor; its sublimity comes from the places where it feels the most broken."[16] Uncut wrote that the album "ultimately dissolves into a beautifully arranged and slightly sickly morass of curdled pop tropes, out of which spurt a bodacious riff or glossy rave arpeggio" and thought that "oddly no-one does this better".[29] John Garratt of PopMatters described the record as "another adventure watching your own sense of subjectivity drown in a pool of confusion".[39] For The Line of Best Fit, Jennifer Johnson twrote, "GOD isn't about sensory pleasure. It's about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing." She concluded, "It isn't so much an album as a junk shop: that proverbial collection of oddities whose perceived value reflects more about the patron than it does the owner who placed them there."[40] In a mixed review, The Guardian's Paul McInnes wrote, "Lopatin is never quite able to stand still and enjoy some of the sounds he creates. This remains a project for only a very particular kind of pop picker."[41] In another mixed review, Joseph Burnett in Dusted magazine wrote that "at its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Delete's rabbit hole of different directions and unexpected asides, but at other times it's easy to feel shut-out, as if you're looking in at someone's intellectual ADHD, but he's steadfastly refusing to meet your gaze."[42]

Sample credits[50]

• "SDFK" contains samples of "Brown" by Grotus and "Dream in White on White" by John Luther Adams.
• "Child of Rage" contains samples of "My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose" by Michael Finnissy, "Cruel When Complete" by Dome and the documentary Child of Rage: A Story of Abuse.
• "Freaky Eyes" contains a sample of "Am I Supposed to Let It by Again (Above the Covers)" by Roger Rodier.
• "No Good" contains a sample of "Return of the Knödler Show" by Hans Reichel.

Credits adapted from AllMusic.[51]

• Daniel Lopatin – producer, artwork
• Paul Corley – mixing, additional production
• Dave Kutch – mastering
• Sebastian Krüger – photography
• Andrew Stasser – design
• Beau Thomas – vinyl cut