Oneohtrix Point Never- Replica

There’s an experience you can only have as a critic, where you listen to something and think: “This is way above my pay grade.” Replica is very close to being one of those albums. Ideally one should listen to this album five times. I’ve only listened to it three, but that’s enough to understand the necessity of the five. And maybe, if I play my cards right, I can convince you to listen to it once, which will lead to another, and another and then…

Throughout these reviews I hope I’ve made one thing perfectly clear: sampling is amazing. If you haven’t gotten that then I’ve failed, but let me make my case one last time. Sampling is about taking disparate parts, seeing a connection, or in some cases forcing a connection, and creating a coherent whole. At its most crude it is like collage, like the album by J Rocc, at it’s most sophisticated it’s like a tapestry, see J Dilla. Either way it is sonically interesting, and there is really no limit to the possibilities.

Enter Replica by Oneohtrix Point Never, ONP for short, another record created by sampling, but unique among those albums which I have reviewed in two respects: one, it’s source material, and two, it’s sound. Replica takes as it’s source material, not samples mined from records, but TV commercials. Now there is more potential here for music than there might appear at first sight. Music is used in commercials all the time, in the background and as jingles. One could pretty easily sample this, loop it and work with the result, but ONP does something different, and that brings us to the sound of the record.

If I  had to use one word to describe the sound of this album, it would be “introspective.” By this I mean that it is calm, understated, and likely to cause a deep meditative state in the listener. There is a lot of ambience here, a lot of quiet speaking, almost as if it’s trying to implant thoughts in your brain. I’m still unclear as to how he managed to do this with the source material he had. He made something so unlike the original it’s unrecognizable. He remade the original as he saw fit, which is sampling taken to its logical extreme.

5/5 This is not a hard listen, but a weird one. And as I’ve said, multiple listens are necessary, but that’ll be apparent after the first.