Rifts

This double CD consists of Daniel Lopatin's first three full length records Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind. '. . . [T]he sounds on Rifts look to past versions of unrealized futures for inspiration. Hearing the record in one sitting is like being in two times and places at once, like watching someone from another decade daydreaming. There is a calm certainty at the heart of these recordings that allows each track to paint a vivid and believable fantasy world through sound. Lopatin is also clearly aware of his music's dialogue with the culture it sprang from. "I'm a sponge," he says. "I love culture and the process of soaking it in is just as rewarding as working from the inside-out and making my own 'unique' work - really I don't see those processes as separate." Perhaps most musically striking about Rifts is its pervading bareness, an aspect that, on the surface, disengages it from the pop canon. Oftentimes a song will appear shimmering and expansive, only to be revealed upon closer inspection as a single spare synth line arpeggiating to infinity. Other moments are filled with pure ambient texture, lending a variety somewhat rare amongst such peers as Caboladies and Emeralds. As well as providing entry points for a variety of listeners, the versatility and mobility of ONP's sound also gives Lopatin an exit strategy if he needs it. That is, through the application of a synthesizer, almost any sound-world in recent memory can be conjured in facsimile. "I wanted to make an album that flowed seamlessly through this unspoken history of musics," Lopatin reiterates, "with the synthesizer as the primary engine for the discovery and marriage of disparate musics, which to me, feel like they really belong together." And that's really the beauty of Rifts and the movement of albums and artists it loosely represents. It's as if the overt hybridization of 21st-century music has finally produced a strange, new singular vision, with various facets being illuminated by every new CD-R and handmade tape release. Rifts' sleek digipack casing is perhaps both an unintentional laying down of the gauntlet and a nod backwards. Or maybe it's just easier to ascribe an epic narrative to an equally epic slab of music.' - Keith Kawaii / Tiny Mix Tapes