“What a place of shit. It also generates interesting people, er, from music to comedy, but it is only the answer to a rigid and boring city with sports.” Lopatin, artistically known as Oneohtrix Point Never, is “the black beast of electronics” that composed the soundtrack of Supreme Marty. Josh Safdie’s adrenaline film Oscar, nine for precision.
In its case, the hardness of Massachusetts has really generated a recognizable personality that can sway between underground electronics and mainstream pop, especially thanks to the collaborations with Fka Twigs and The Weeknd. But nothing brought him into the spotlight as the work he did for the cinema and in particular with the Safdie brothers. An artistic union started in 2017 with Good Time and continued with Diamanti Grezzi, the TV series The Curse and the already mentioned Marty Supreme, which brought it to the shortlist of the Oscars.
“Josh is not very different from the characters he invents. It is tireless, its energy is always at its best,” says Rolling Stone. Lopatin, on the other hand, defines himself a bit more introverted and shy, but recognizes Safdie’s ability to pull out a different kind of energy. “He likes the wildest part of me,” he says. The film, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Marty Mauser, a young boy with the dream of becoming the best ping pong player in the world. But with the typical pessimism of Safdie, the morally questionable protagonist is forced to overcome constant inciamps of his plans.
Daniel Lopatin builds a lively and percussive soundtrack, a real extra character, inspired by the 80s melodies, which draws on the works of Tangerine Dream and Thomas Newman, relying largely on synthesized vibrations and explicitly inserting pop songs by Tears for Fears, Alphaville and Peter Gabriel. Choice explained with a saying-not told by the same author who lets it mean that the initial script should follow Marty until that time. Idea that influenced in every way both on the construction of sound, “Josh and I tend to think about the soundtrack in an allegorical way: something that suggests what is not said, the intuitions of the characters or a kind of feeling.”.
The link between the Safdie and Lopatin brothers is realized in a constant influence in the reciprocal works. On the occasion of the release of his album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the two directors directed the music video of the single Lost But Never Alone, in which “the synth rasoiates of the song are in the background to an obsessive television zapping, coming from a moment imbued between the end of the 1980s and the middle of the 1990s,” explains Alessio Baronci.
But in the world of OPN cinema and music mix continuously, even beyond the “Sfera Safdie”. In 2013 he signed, along with Brian Reitzell, the music of Bling Ring, a film written and directed by Sofia Coppola that narrates the real story of a band of young losangelini who introduce themselves to the houses of characters of the show to rob them. Another example of perfect continuity between history and soundtrack.
More recently, instead, the collaboration with the pop star The Weeknd. Daniel Lopatin participates in the creation of his last three albums: After Hours, Dawn FM and Hurry Up Tomorrow. Work that sees him also involved in the Hurry Up Tomorrow project, a 2025 film directed by Trey Edward Shults who accompanied the homonymous album and sees Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye as a fictional version of himself, struggling with depression and insomnia.
In short, whether it’s his music albums or film collaborations, Lopatin’s will always seem to be to translate the hectic images of life into sound, “I know that my music may seem difficult, but I don’t feel it like that. It seems to me that people understand it well: it is a kind of hallucinatory cartoon made of sounds”.
L’articolo Daniel Lopatin: the electricity of images comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
