Oneohtrix Point Never

Tranquilizer emerges from a question that has haunted Oneohtrix Point Never’s work for years: what do we do with the music that will, inevitably, be lost? If Replica repurposed bootleg DVDs of 80s/90s TV commercials into ghostly miniatures, Tranquilizer returns to that terrain through another forgotten format: Y2K‑era commercial sample CDs, pre‑packaged libraries of royalty‑free sounds once marketed to producers and DJs. Lopatin found roughly 400GB of these niche discs and “muzak ROMplers” on the Internet Archive during the COVID era, bookmarked them - then returned one day to find the archive gone. When it resurfaced elsewhere, he seized the moment, feeding this forest of strange sonic detritus through rudimentary sample‑browsing software, bouncing around the digital thicket until moments of magic occurred.

The sounds on Tranquilizer strongly suggest that the CDs he accessed were geared toward ambient/new‑age creators: breathy pads, harp‑like trills, soft chimes, generic “world” textures and ersatz acoustic instruments sit at the core of the palette. Yet the album’s title is ironic. Critics repeatedly note that Tranquilizer does not convey relaxation; instead, it entices the listener with familiar, blandly anonymous sounds only to introduce unexpected twists - rhythmic jolts, harmonic feints, glitchy ruptures. More often stupefying than sedative, the record “gives itself over to the slipperiness of time,” letting nostalgia and unease coexist inside its mosaics.