Garden of Delete

Background and recording

Following the release of his 2013 album R Plus Seven and work on several side projects, Lopatin was unexpectedly invited to support the rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden on their 2014 joint amphitheater tour as a replacement for Death Grips. With the permission of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Lopatin performed 30-minute opening sets of self-described "cyberdrone" to often vexed arena rock crowds. The tour reunited him with the misanthropic 1990s grunge music of his teenage years and prompted him to reengage with his memories of adolescence and puberty, which he described as "pretty traumatic."

Upon completing the tour and returning to Brooklyn, Lopatin rented a small, windowless basement studio and began recording new material. Drawing on his experiences touring, he noted that "a lot of my thoughts on the record were about dealing with puberty and how your pubescent body is essentially the staging area for all this mutation." Other inspirations included the video hosting service Vevo, satellite radio stations such as Ozzy's Boneyard and Lithium, and the writing of French philosopher Julia Kristeva (in particular, her influential 1980 essay Powers of Horror). 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?

In addition, the isolated recording environment encouraged an abrasive and dense sound relative to OPN's recent releases, with Lopatin stating that "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."

Composition

Lopatin expressed his desire to "make a hyperactive/depressive record" and "conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions." In addition to the "cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and [...] synthesized sounds" of R Plus Seven, the album draws on metal, top 40 radio, EDM, alternative rock, industrial, and trance music. It is the first OPN album to prominently feature "sung" vocals, which were rendered using the software instrument Chipspeech. The program allowed Lopatin to write lyrics and play them chromatically. 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." The Fader wrote that "the record, a meticulous collage of mutilated samples and computer-generated voices, careens between uncanny familiarity and total alienness." The release was accompanied by a lyric sheet.

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." 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." 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."

Promotional campaign

The album was announced in August 2015 via a series of internet posts originating from Lopatin's website, including a cryptic PDF letter to Lopatin's fans. Its first single, "I Bite Through It," was released on September 3, 2015, and was followed later that month with the release of the album's MIDI files, with Lopatin encouraging fans to create their own songs from the material. Second single "Mutant Standard" was released on October 21. "Sticky Drama" was released on November 4, and accompanied by a two-part music video directed by Jon Rafman. In Fall 2016, Lopatin premiered a music video for "Animals," directed by Rick Alverson and featuring Val Kilmer, at UCLA's Hammer Museum film series Ecco: The Videos of Oneohtrix Point Never and Related Works.

The release of Garden of Delete was preceded by an enigmatic internet promotional campaign devised by Lopatin in collaboration with friends. The project sketched out a loose fictional backstory involving Lopatin himself, an acne-ridden teenage alien blogger named Ezra, and a supposed 1990s band called Kaoss Edge. It incorporated websites (Ezra's c. 1990s blog and Kaoss Edge's 'official' website), fabricated interviews, Twitter accounts, invented music genres (i.e. "hypergrunge") and teaser videos. Kaoss Edge's main website contains a repository of MIDI files (most from the album while others are transcripts of Allan Holdsworth's guitar solos), along with a band biography and discography with links to internet pages for unaffiliated cultural entities (i.e. flyers for prog rock band Rush, YouTube guitar tutorials) and other obscure information scattered around the site.

Lopatin described the promo 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." The Quietus described the campaign as "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." Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork Media 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."

Critical reception

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." 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." In a positive review UK magazine The Skinny described Garden of Delete in contrast to OPN'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." Tiny Mix Tapes called the album "an unruly masterpiece of pure synthesis occurring in a post-PC Music world," writing that "with Garden of Delete, [Lopatin] sets out to implode his art in a brilliant display of cultural denial, a reflexive operation that claims a 'total loss' of cultural net-worth by damaging itself with the same semiotic structures that it indicts." Kyle Carney of Exclaim! wrote that the record manages to sound accessible despite its complexities, calling it "a sound collage like no other." Under the Radar called it "a complex beast of shade and mood, and [...] Lopatin's best work yet."

Writing for Consequence of Sound, Sasha Geffen called the album "OPN’s most emotional work to date and also his most ridiculous. Its tragedy is bound up with its humor; its sublimity comes from the places where it feels the most broken." 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. Oddly no-one does this better." John Garratt of PopMatters described the record as "another adventure watching your own sense of subjectivity drown in a pool of confusion." For The Line of Best Fit, Jennifer Johnson opined that "GOD isn’t about sensory pleasure. It’s about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing," concluding that "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." In a mixed review, The Guardian's Paul McInnes wrote that "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." In another mixed review, 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."

Accolades

Garden of Delete was included as one of the year's best albums by a variety of publications.

Track listing

All tracks composed by Daniel Lopatin unless otherwise specified:

Sample credits

Personnel

Credits adapted from AllMusic.