Returnal

Background and recording

Returnal was recorded and mixed by Lopatin using the programs Goldwave and Multiquence. Most of the material was produced in an air-conditioned room at his parents' house in Massachusetts (credited as "Ridge Valley Digital") from July to August 2009. The album's first song was recorded in Brooklyn. Instruments including the Akai AX60, the Roland Juno-60, the Roland MSQ-700 and the Korg Electribe ES-1 as well as voice parts by Lopatin are present throughout the album, although the Roland SP-555 and Sherman Filterbank were also used in the development process.

Lopatin described Returnal as a "Rousseau record", saying, "He’s a French painter during this exoticism period. They’re very interesting, they’re not one-to-one depictions of nature, explicitly because he didn’t really like or appreciate nature. So I was drawn to that, that’s kind of a vibe." He further explained to critic Simon Reynolds, "I wanted to make a world-music record. But make it hyperreal, refracted through not really being in touch with the world. [...] So I'm painting these pictures, not of the actual world, but of us watching that world." He described the imagined scenario behind the album's opening track "Nil Admirari": "the mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment, killing some James Cameron–type predator."

Analysis

Fact described the album as "music driven by an ecological rather than a narrative impulse, more interested in testing the limits of space rather than telling stories within it." Resident Advisor stated that "Returnal feels like a document as dazed and dizzy as heatstroke, the other-state peace of dehydration or exhaustion. But its emotional terrain is in constant flux—if, thankfully, slow to evolve—full of transitions and almost sullen mood-swings that make it, at various points, entrancing, bewitching and often quite perplexing." Critic Philip Sherburne noted Returnal to be more focused, thick and composite than Lopatin's past work, noting that when the synthesized arpeggios common in his previous releases do come up, they are "layered and blurred to the point of losing their definition." Comparing Returnal with Lopatin's previous works, Tiny Mix Tapes described the album as "not just a collection of tracks but an indivisible and cohesive whole, held in place this time not by grids and zones but by atmospheres and plumes."

Resident Advisor described the album as beginning in "comic assault mode—the crude tangles of noise, serrated drum machines and vocal screams of 'Nil Admirari'." Sherburne described "Nil Admirari" as an "unexpected invocation" of noise music, employing "weeping voice, feedback squeal, synthesizer drones, and overdriven drum blasts" that "combust like a rocket on its launch pad," while The Quietus characterized it as "sort of hurtful: sliced-up aural detritus with no enduring rhythm or melody." Resident Advisor characterized tracks "Describing Bodies" and "Stress Waves" as "almost hymnal." The album's title track is a "mournful ballad" which "buries Lopatin's pitch-shifted vocals into a disorienting forest-haunt." Simon Reynolds described closing track "Preyouandi" as "a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating, a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe, [...] it's still the sort of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery." Both Reynolds and Kiran Sande of Fact noted occasional similarities between the album and Jon Hassell's concept of fourth world music.

Artwork

The cover art for Returnal was photographed by Yelena Avanesova and designed by Stephen O'Malley.

In other media

The song "Ouroboros" was later featured on The Bling Ring soundtrack, which Lopatin also worked on.

Track listing

All tracks written and produced by Daniel Lopatin.