Oneohtrix Point Never is the artist name of Daniel Lopatin. That should be a simple, factual statement, but it starts to break down as soon as it comes into proximity with his latest release, Garden of Delete.

The entirety of this album’s backstory revolves around a band called Kaoss Edge. They make hypergrunge, a microgenre at the confluence of hardcore dance and aggro, screamy rock music. It is the project of someone called Ezra. He might be an alien. He has a Twitter account with its location listed as Winthrop, Massachusetts, and a Blogspot with 21 posts mostly from 1997 and ‘98, and an interview with Daniel Lopatin from this August. Ezra is angry that most of Lopatin’s new work is just stealing from his own back catalogue. Kaoss Edge has an official website, which is mostly full of awful .gifs, mismatched tiled backgrounds, broken links, impossible to read text and a bunch of MIDI files. These files are basically the notation for central parts of each track in Garden of Delete.

Lopatin himself has pointed towards these files and said: “Look! I’m plagiarising! This music is not mine.” He has encouraged fans to download the files and use them to construct alternate versions of the tracks. He has promoted these to his own social media following, celebrating the work of others. I have a feeling some of them are his own work, but the origin of many of them is genuinely ambiguous.

I do not believe that either Ezra or Kaoss Edge are real. I do not believe there was hypergrunge band putting out underground releases in the 90s for Lopatin to copy. I believe Lopatin is the creator of the website and blog, as well as the two tracks put out under the Kaoss Edge name. I believe he wants to deliberately disown his work.

Some of that is just a clever marketing ploy to get the fanboys deeply invested in this project. But its effect is really substantial. He is essentially claiming that every version of the translation of his own raw ideas into sonic form is equally real and equally valid. He has constructed an environment where all the basic rules of artistic authority are voided; the ‘text’ of this project is everything he chooses to stitch into the fabric of the album. The entirety of the album’s publicity, design, even composition, is engineered to disavow and confuse its authorship.

In doing so he has succeeded in creating a quite unique product. It is a project uniquely possible due to and fundamentally interconnected with the arrival of near-costless duplication and of the breakdown of any notion of ‘ownership’ or ‘authorship’ in a digital space (for further reading, see Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism). He has created an album of virtual images; copies with no original. What has arrived today is wholly disconnected to what once entered.

The most succint nod to this is ‘ECCOJAMC1’, a transitory return to his Chuck Person moniker and the eccojams he released back in 2010, slowed-down screwball slices of disposable 80s pop. Those thirty-two seconds encode the entire basis of the album – completely interwoven with  the album's and the artist’s context, untethered to the tradition that birthed it, contemptuous of its audience, superficially vile, essentially and wondrously fake.

The rest of the album simply attempts to embody these ideas. The tracks are structurally smoother and more internally coherent than on his past release R Plus Seven, where the music was abstract and flattened in the extreme. Each song has components of a narrative – maybe fragmentary, maybe disordered, but they are there. It even seems to follow the shadowy contours of a rock album at points. Make no mistake though, they are an truly brutal listen. ‘Intro’ flows into the knotted ‘Ezra’ (he’s everywhere!) as densely packed trance arps clatter against cutely squealing chipmunk voices in its overwhelming midpoint climax. But it’s a false dawn – the rest of the track rolls out, a continuation of the opening ideas, calm, sedate and meticulously crafted.

‘SDFK’ is a dense little loop of orchestral noise, so obviously constructed that the click made as the clip loops is the most prominent sound on the track. ‘Animals’ is a beautifully expansive, looping, vaulting synthetic workout, each note greasy and strung out. ‘I Bite Right Through’, released as the first single, is a violent, assaulting barrage of off-kilter rhythm that barely manages to hang itself together which eventually collapses in on itself, dragging on its angry struggle as long as it possibly can. Album closer ‘No Good’ is a two-speed monster, switching between cracked nylon guitar and what Kanye’s ‘Lost In The World’ would have sounded like if it were on Yeezus, not MBDTF. With some more bass.

There are two tracks at the core of this album: firstly the eight-minute epic ‘Mutant Standard’, starting off with a hard, relentless techno bassline, from which somehow emerges a neon blast of more trance arpeggios. The riff is straight from the MIDI files (5 5-Zebra2), yet the execution is utterly huge, pushing limits of both decency and oppressive positivity. It is exhausting to listen to, but that is an integral part of the experience – unlike in R Plus Seven, the glory of the music Lopatin has written is not cathartic, but instead a reflection of its vulgar extremity. This is the statement at the centre of the album: treating this as meaningful is a fool’s game, no one can deal with this much stuff. There were ideas here once, but there’s no way they are salvageable. They have been recombined and redistributed too many times. Don’t try. Just listen.

Alongside it is ‘Lift’, another track which had its MIDI picked over as ‘DUNE.midi’ before the album’s release. Not only is it incredibly dynamic and beautifully light, it provides the musical summation of the album. It opens with fast, onrushing stabs and slowly births the motif from fragments of voices coming from a multitude of instruments, almost in spite of its harsh origin. As Lopatin describes in his essay/takedown on smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G, we have grown used to simultaneously experiencing the emotional manipulation music can cause as well as its lack of management, its incoherence, maybe just how fucking awful sounding it is. It can function “as a sculptural object but it’s abusive on a practical level.”

This is a horrible album to listen to. Yet, given the context of the album’s creation, its ideas are suddenly drawn into focus. It morphs from in-joke at best, ‘fuck you’ at worst to a deeply exposing work from Lopatin. It has an genuinely unique perspective on our post-digital condition and the mess of possession, agency and identity it has handed us. If you pick below the slime-splattered surface, it may teach you something wonderfully new.

Which ‘it’ is doing the teaching though? Jury’s still out on that one. I doubt it really matters.

@regresssion