Interview: Oneohtrix Point Never

As Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin is connected to the noise circuit through early releases on Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun label, although most of his output bears little relation to that scene. Inspired as much by library music, jazz-fusion and his love-hate relationship with new age, his sonic drift carries the musicality of synth-fetishism with ambient warmth and an imagery realised by his own videos (which can be found via his YouTube channel). He found a wider public with the 2009 No Fun double CD Rifts, which compiled several of his earlier releases, and reinforced this interest with the Editions Mego-released album Returnal the following year. 2011 saw the release of his album Replica, on his own label Software, as well as the launch of his collaboration with old friend Joel Ford to form Ford & Lopatin (formerly Games). The son of Russian immigrants and professional musicians, Lopatin discusses his musical background, his megalomania and why he loves his old Juno 60 while seated on the couch at the 2011 Academy in Madrid.

I guess we should start with your hat, because it’s where you come from – Boston. Did you grow up there?

I grew up in the suburbs outside Boston, 20 miles west of Boston, and I went to college in western Massachusetts, about an hour and a half west from Boston. And then I returned to Boston and worked for a little while, then moved to New York in 2008.

What’s growing up in the suburbs of Boston like?

It’s really mellow. There’s an undercurrent of puritanical stuff just ‘cause of the history, so you get a lot of uptight people. And lots of Victorian houses; then a lot of contemporary split-deck houses that were built in the 60s and 70s that are nice to look at. Bike paths and trees, mostly idyllic and academic oriented ‘cause of the schools and the history of that.

I was born here and [my parents] emigrated in 1982 from St Petersburg. My dad had a degree and was capable of pretty high-level engineering stuff, but he found himself in a shoe factory, just kicking around. That was the story for a lot of people. They were very well educated but kind of stifled. So for someone like by dad, he was perhaps adventurous or just concerned about his kids’ future, to the point where moving was realistic.

He was already a musician before he came to the States and your mother also was a piano teacher.

She studied classical piano when she was young – and musicology. She was a producer of a Soviet radio programme so she did a lot of research and fact gathering. My father was basically on the other side of the tracks, having grown up in the Ukraine, which is a very different landscape. His city, which was a much smaller city, wasn’t ultra-cosmopolitan, so his upbringing was tougher. He taught himself accordion and transferred that to piano and was in a bunch of rock bands in the 60s.

Early on your mother tried to teach you piano. She made you take lessons and you weren’t too happy about it.

She tried. I was kind of a slacker. I don’t think I was really too different to most kids I grew up with. I just wanted to be a monkey and hang out in a tree and play video games. Certain things I still retain from the lessons she gave me, just kind of basic harmony stuff. But I was terrible playing two hands, I cheated all the time, I’d listen to her playing and copy it. In my mind I’m totally fooling my mum. I’m eight years old, I have no idea what I’m doing, it’s totally wrong. She’s just sitting there, ‘just forget it’. But other little things, like recently someone noticed my hand posture – this was someone that studied classical piano – was: “Hmm, nice posture.” I had no idea, but it was something she probably instilled over and over by rote, repetition.

At what age did you say, ‘mum, video games – that’s where it’s at’?

I’m not sure I ever said that. They did buy me a Nintendo, oddly. I just remember the shock ‘cause I never got any gifts, nothing. When I was sick my mum would buy me a GI Joe or something, but only when I was sick. But the Nintendo was an odd purchase, I was shocked, ‘cause it was expensive at the time, about $150. It seemed out of their style.

What were the games you were first into?

Mario. I wasn’t into any obscure games or anything. I was really bad at Zelda, I couldn’t find the raft. All my friends could find the raft and I couldn’t. I wasn’t good at video games, but I liked the fantasy, the immersive psychedelic experience, although I didn’t know what that was at the time. I loved listening to it, I loved watching it and my friends were good and I’d watch them play. I was good at some games, like Mario Andretti’s racing for some reason. My dad would just buy whatever was in the cheap [section]: “Here’s this Mario Andretti racing game.” The worst game.

Your dad was also playing music when he came to the States. He was keyboards in a band; or was he not keyboards, playing accordion?

He was playing accordion sounds, presets. You have to understand, Russian music is very provincial in a lot of ways; it’s basic and straightforward and even their pop songs are sad, for some reason. He had some real success in St. Petersburg in a band called Flying Dutchman. We found out in the last few years there was a Russian Encyclopaedia Of Rock and his band was listed in the top five or ten, I don’t know what it was. But it’s a big point of pride for him. But he wasn’t able to stay in the band ‘cause he had a family and didn’t want to drop out of school, so he de-prioritised that. But then throughout the ‘70s he jumped around in different resort bands, as I understand it, so he would play these Russian countryside, lakeside… I think one band was called Pelican. I can only imagine what these bands sound like.

No recordings exist?

No, there was one label, one government label. Either you were a government-authorised band and you were on this label or you didn’t exist pretty much. Also it was a covers band, he played in a lot of covers bands. The cover band scene in St Petersburg at this time was really rough ‘cause no one could get their hands on American or British music. So if you could play The Doors or The Beatles, you were basically this intermediary between life behind the Iron Curtain and the western world. But that was prohibitive.

When he came to the States he was playing old Russian folk music to remind people of where they came from?

Yeah, they were just little rock renditions of traditional songs. My dad was super into Joe Cocker and he loves people that take a classic song and rework it in their own way, repurposing. That’s what he would do in his band, Russian versions of western songs. In the 80s he had this band called Second Wind. He was in his late 30s, early 40s, so they were: “We’re over the hill, so Second Wind.” And they wore these matching chequered sweatshirts. I think he was having fun more than anything.

Eventually though, you got the keyboard he was using. At what point did that happen? Or were you in bands before that?

I was not in bands, I have a hard time being in bands ‘cause I’m a megalomaniac. But my friends had a grunge band, and the lead singer played the saxophone and scatted like Anthony Kiedis or whatever.

Doesn’t sound like a grunge band to me.

No, exactly. My whole upbringing was just all these confused haywire bad decisions. But that guy was Al Carlson, who is our mixing engineer, and the guitarist at the time, Joel Ford, is also someone who worked with them in various capacities. So we all stayed really close friends and grew up together, more or less. But I wasn’t accepted into the band because I was supposed to be the bass player, arbitrarily – “You’re the bass player.”

But you knew how to play bass.

No, I didn’t know how to do anything, but I knew what the guitar looked like. But they didn’t like my picking style ‘cause it was guitar. I didn’t play like this, I used my thumb. So they rejected me. So then I went off and did my own thing, my experimental period, like 13 or 15 – not really. Nothing interesting happened, but when they caught up with me and we all converged and started listening to these records, jazz-fusion records in high school, our taste started converging on that, instead of Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever. Then I was useful to them.

Seems that jazz-fusion is a pretty unlikely cool-guy thing to be into at high school.

There was nothing about us that was cool and I still feel extremely awkward to this day. Nothing has changed in that sense. My high school wasn’t cool. There weren’t any punks or any indie rock presence. I was missing that entirely, I didn’t have that perspective. The weirdest thing going on in my high school was the theatre kids doing pirouettes or reciting whatever. There was nothing going on.

[Mahavishnu Orchestra’s] Birds Of Fire is a record my dad had taped on a Maxell tape with just a bunch of fusion stuff. Like he had a Jean-Luc Ponty record, just 70s stuff that was jazzy. The thing that’s important about all this stuff in general for me, I didn’t know at the time it was a mainstream entry way into long-formed jam music. I didn’t know Neu! existed, I didn’t know Kraftwerk, I didn’t know synth music was out there. So it was an entryway into hearing textures that were unusual to me. I still love the music, I think some of it’s cornier than others, but you can say that about krautrock or whatever too.

So it’s the textures more than anything that got to you.

Yeah, this album has Jan Hammer on it… But I loved Jan Hammer, I loved Chick Corea, I loved synth players and the sounds of ARPs and Moogs and at that time. I didn’t know what I was hearing was a sample-and-hold function. I didn’t know much of anything but I would hear these records and then the Juno 60 my father had was in the basement, so I would go down there and do my extremely crude imitations of Jan Hammer or a bender-laden solo or whatever. I was just piecing together, it was the beginning of me piecing together that vibe.

A lot of people would listen to that and be: ‘here’s riffs, here’s the complexity’. I’m interested in the texture being the more interesting thing to you. Obviously the music you make is very abstract.

Yeah, I don’t know what drew me to it. I think it was instinctual on some level. I wasn’t being intellectual about it at that point in my life.

Was that the first stuff you started making?

Not really, I don’t know what I was making. I had such a rogue understanding of chords and stuff. It didn’t all start coming together until I started listening to radio and hearing contemporary stuff, and then hearing the influences of stuff in contemporary stuff, hearing techno and hip hop. There was this college radio station, Emerson Radio, 88.9 in Boston, and they had really good hip hop shows and techno at night. Just basic, kind of drawing parallels, there’s a scheme that’s a grander electronic music scheme. Texture was important, I was definitely drawn to music that was more abstracted. I have a hard time training myself to listen to lyrics. I have an amazing appreciation for it now, but I’m practically 30 now. It took me a long time to get to the point where I had the capacity to listen to music for its lyrics, so a lot of the music I was drawn to, I wasn’t a lyrics guy. I don’t want to hear about your rock tale. I do now, in a way, it’s interesting to me, but at the time I didn’t really have the capacity for it.

So you go into the basement, you play with this Juno 60. A lot of people who start playing with instruments want to move on to bigger and better machines that have real complexity, but the Juno 60 is a real love story for you.

Yeah, there are a couple of levels with it. One, it’s extremely sentimental. Everyone has things they’re in possession of, or they’re in their family, they have sentimental attachment to it. That’s one thing. Another thing is I learned on it, so I can use it really effectively ‘cause I focused on it. One of the things that overwhelms me to this day about gear is too many choices. When you’re like, ‘Oh, I can jack with any VST possible, I can have this synth from eBay‘, or whatever, you stop focusing on you, you just become this obsessive gear hound. I’ve gone through phases like that where it’s this addictive thing, where you want to absorb as much sound as possible and hear as much stuff as possible and generate as much variety as possible. I don’t mean to judge it in a negative way, but one of the things that fundamentally shaped me was not having all those choices for many years, just having this one thing. It becomes about you as a composer or an artist, it becomes about you and other gear. So it helped me ‘cause it was like a reflection, a mirror for me.

Do you remember recording Russian Mind?

Yes, vividly actually. It was one track, it was an Akai Headrush Delay and the Juno and it was arpeggiator in the latch mode and some delay setting and chord changes. That was one of the few times where I was: “There’s a lot of chords there.” I don’t even know how that happened, I was just trying to do fake counterpoint stuff. Also, I was obsessed with this Dopplereffekt track called “Z-Boson” and this was my “Z-Boson” tribute/rip-off track.

You’ve had a couple of other projects by yourself, when you first created these tracks were you, ‘this is something else’?

Yeah, the first three records were all compiled on this double-disc thing that No Fun put out called Rifts. The first four all had title tracks. The title tracks were always these arpeggiator jams and in my mind they were like little film themes. I was really into soundtrack music, Bruton stuff, library records, stock music. A lot of what I was doing was referencing that, and also Legowelt, Danny Wolfer, and his arsenal of aliases doing film-oriented action adventure, like spy movie music. So early on I was so into that and wanting to do it in my own way. That’s where that palette came from.

All the track titles are pretty evocative.

It’s all sci-fi, I was obsessed with PK Dick, Philip K. Dick.

“Betrayed In The Octagon”.

Yeah, but a lot of the titles were… the thing is, they’re really jokey. I don’t know if people think I’m on that, but I was kind of taking the piss a bit. Still to this day, it’s not like I want to be an astronaut and travel. I just got a kick that there was this whole world of records made by these dweebs with synthesizers, like me, that were imagined in these little studios, outside of the mainstream channels, that were inspired by this phantasmagorical shit. I loved that and naturally gravitated towards it.

So you’re constantly thinking about what this track is soundtracking?

Yeah, I guess the way my brain is wired, I like to have a point of view.

Does it come first, does it come in the middle or does it come last?

It can come wherever. It’s just a way of negotiating my way relationship to music, art and ideas. I don’t think the music is dependent on my personal diary of little aesthetic ideas. I think they’re listenable records, they can be good on their own, but for me personally it was a really good way of getting psyched, engaging, having a point of view and believing in what I was doing. Even if those things were like ephemeral and subject to change, just whimsical or whatever or jokey, I really needed that.

Why?

Because it makes me more in the moment, it makes me play better. I realise it’s not for everybody, but for me there’s an urgency to playing music. I want to push this weird corollary idea forward. Maybe I’m oversharing, but I tend to do that, I’m verbose about the stuff in general, but the best suggestion I can give is for people that want to do electronic music, find your reason to do it. Whatever that reason is, just own it and love it. ‘Cause your point of view matters. That’s something that music gave me, too, it’s a way to engage with the world and be creative on your own terms. It’s good to exercise that part of your brain.

Do you ever get to that point in your music-making process of this obscene fixation…

Yeah, I was listening to so many new age records and they’re undeniably bad records, but there’s something about them I was listening to and enjoying. But I was fixated on this idea that you could use the tropes of new age music to describe something beyond the cliché that is new age music: like chill out and be in your Zen-like cave amongst nature. I don’t even like that, I don’t go to the woods or whatever, I don’t do anything. But that’s an interesting idea that people would want to do that, to create music that’s a simulated Zen forest vibe. That’s a terrible idea, you should never do that. What I was trying to do, whether I did or not I don’t know, but what I wanted to do was make music that implied certain aspects of new age but was pretty sinister.

You talked a bit about Returnal, a record that was after the Rifts, being your Rousseau record, the French painter from the 19th century. Can you talk a little bit about that and explain that that means? ‘Cause I think it’s this simulated world thing a little.

Yeah, 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.

Tell me about that record, Returnal, it seems like it’s the one that brought you to a wider audience.

The record was finished. I sat on it and I sent it to Carlos Giffoni at No Fun and he was: “Ah, I don’t like this record.” I sent it to Mego and didn’t hear anything back for a very long time and that gave me a lot of time to think about what I’d done and I was, ‘Oh, there’s something missing’.

So the first person you sent it to was Carlos. Why?

He reissued my first recording, my tape Betrayed In The Octagon, on vinyl. He put out Russian Mind, which was another record. Then he did the Rifts anthology; he’d been really instrumental.

How did you get in touch with him originally?

I sent him tracks through a messageboard, there was a noise messageboard that still exists called I  Heart Noise Troniks or something. I didn’t know how to reach him, and his MySpace – remember on MySpace they’d have these quotes by your name? – his was:“Do not ask me to play your festival.” That’s what it said and I was: “Fucking arsehole.”

The stuff you’re making is not noise though, but you’ve got caught up in that scene.

The thing is, by the time that Double Leopards, which is a group that inspired me a lot, are doing music that is not noise either, but is definitely situated among the global noise community. That whole style and approach to structuring improvisational music, that’s what I was exposed to with Double Leopards and stuff like that. So noise as this fist-pumping thing was not for me, but there were already bands doing interesting variations on that, but still using the structural approaches of noise to make different kinds of music, free, improvised music.

Do you think that Double Leopards were one of the bands that helped that along and changed its mindset, the noise community?

Yeah, undoubtedly. I’ve rarely met a band in my generation of kids making peaceful – not really peaceful but gentle – noise who don’t talk about Double Leopards. Then they went on to form Religious Knives, which was a rock band with vocals. They were always, ‘I don’t give a fuck’, they just do whatever they want. And that was super inspiring for sure.

Carlos is obviously wide open ears. Why do you think he didn’t like this album? Did he explain further than ‘no’?

No, he doesn’t explain, he’s a man of few words, but he doesn’t pander to anything. He won’t put stuff out just because. He puts stuff out that he likes. So ultimately he’s 100% OK and I really appreciate that about him.

So why Mego next? Emeralds or Mego?

It’s funny, it always seems Emeralds will put out a record on their label, I’ll put out a record on their label. So it’s always in their kangaroo pouch or whatever. I don’t know, there’s just so few record labels that I knew about and respected or felt psyched about, so yeah. I knew Mego was out there.

They seem in the past couple of years to have really opened up again to different artists. They had a coterie, Fennesz and all these European guys. Now you have Americans coming over and doing stuff.

I think Peter [Rehberg] is a lot like Carlos in that way. He’s not somebody that panders to an idea of what he’s supposed to be. Mego represents certain things to certain people. There was an era when they were brutal, digital, Russell Haswell, Florian Hecker. There’s a very distinct sound with Mego that’s interesting. But Peter himself, his roots are very humble in a way; he’s a person that’s very familiar with punk rock. He’s a down-to-earth guy. He gets interested in something and feels like it’s worth putting out, he does it.

I read an interview with you where you said you emailed him about possibly doing a remix album and you said, “I wanted that Mego vibe,” and he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Yeah, he denies it. What I meant was… I shouldn’t have written that email. I write a lot of emails I shouldn’t write. But I was, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Florian Hecker and every single dude from Mego patted me on the back and told me I was awesome?’, which is basically what remixes are. There are other things too. But I think his response was more just, ‘fuck off, come on’.

So why did your latest album with Joel Ford, you did an entire remix album?

That wasn’t really my idea. It’s fine, it worked out fine. The remix record sometimes can be really cool. In the case of the F&L record, the songs are so varied, the stems are really interesting. There was a lot of room for seeing it become more dance-edit friendly, so it made sense in that case. But would I personally do a remix record again? Maybe not.

What is your approach to remixing? Have you done a lot of remixes?

Here and there, yeah.

Does there have to be something you like in the original?

It’s difficult, yeah. There has to be some element that’s salvageable. I’ve notice that a lot of the remixes I do sound the same, I think I’ve done one remix of many artists so I’m, ‘maybe I shouldn’t do these anymore’. My recording approach is pretty raw, or had been, so it’s difficult to massage what I do into a context that I think is like... there’s a factory/industrial-style approach to remixes that works. You cut stuff up in Ableton, you work things and make them fit. You make a club edit or an ambient edit or whatever. I find it to be extremely challenging for me personally because I don’t necessarily utilise those tools that well or in that kind of way, so it’s tricky for me, the remix thing.

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You said your recording process used to be raw, more raw. How’s it changed?

The last record I made, Replica, we made it in a studio in a more or less professional environment [laughs]. We were having a lot of fun. You’re in a studio, you’re learning the technology on the go. I’d become somewhat familiar with Pro Tools from the F&L record prior, so there was a level of comfort with Pro Tools that was new to me. Even during Channel Pressure, I wasn’t zipping around the tracks fixing stuff fast. I think the true mark of whether you’re good at Pro Tools is how fast you are at it [laughs]. Then kind of understanding what Al, our mixing engineer was doing, his choices and why his choices and what he could bring.

Al seems pretty important to the sound. What does he bring to it as a mixing engineer?

Bass. We just listened to Returnal and I was “Oof!” I heard this and there was sibilant stuff, it’s very mid-band heavy, it was recorded in Goldwave and Multiquence. I don’t know if you guys know about it, but it’s not worth knowing about basically. But I’ve actually used those two programs in conjunction with each other for many years. So Al, being super creative, but he’s also just a scientist. So he’s: “Yeah, I want to make your record and bring out the whole spectrum. I want it not to be so mid-band heavy and to have low-end and interesting top.” Basic stuff like that.

Have you learned a lot from him or are you just, ‘go ahead, take care of it for me’?

No, you can’t do that with an engineer, I don’t care who he is. You have to mitigate it but at the same time there was a lot of jamming he was doing. We would do a lot of performance, one-take sampler performances. An SP555, and I would just play the pads, I had an idea of an arrangement in my head. And while I was doing the arrangement and a take, in the hopes that it would work, he was on a Sherman Filterbank and just shredding my 555 signal on another track. So there was that interaction and he was jamming. ‘cause he was learning the Filterbank during that session too. That became a big sound on that record, all the super-coarse sounds, like audio being ripped, super low-end and fuzzy weirdness.

You put it out on your label, Software. Tell me about forming your own label and what that means. Are you going to put out records by other people or just your own stuff?

Yeah, the idea was basically to have an imprint that was administered by a label that…

It’s Mexican Summer, right?

Yeah, so Mexican Summer administers the label and is teaching us how to be a label and also using their distribution arm to get our records into shops and make it visible to people. It’s really cool, it came around the idea of them having a studio in their offices, which is a very rare thing. When I was talking to labels, what was being offered was good, but not musically inspiring. It was like ‘this is cool’, but they’re pretty straightforward arrangements. But I really don’t have the money, even if I take a deal with a label that on the surface is a good fit, I still to have spend tens of thousands of dollars on studio time to have that luxury of being in a studio without feeling pressured. So I really wanted to indulge in being in the studio environment for as long as I needed.

How long did you need?

I don’t know, it was an experiment. Channel Pressure took three and a half months or something in the studio. So those three and a half months cut down on the time it took to do Replica ‘cause we had learned certain things. The main thing I’m trying to say here is that it wasn’t enticing me now ‘cause I wanna have a label or there’s a profit motive to having a label. It’s because it allowed me to have more ownership, to be closer to and have access to this really beautiful studio that’s down the street from where I live. And that’s something I valued and still value very much, it’s been a good thing.

Why did you want to get in the studio so badly? As someone who does home recording, I would think you’d be comfortable setting up in your bedroom. It seems very important to you that you got there.

It’s OK, but I wanted to make a record that sounds fuller. The studio is like a rock studio, that’s the thing that is important. This is an electronic music studio set-up you guys have here. But you have these stations, other than that main control room, live room area with the board and the Mellotron or whatever. You have these little bedroom set-up’s, you even call them that, right? So what I wanted was the analogue studio with the classic rock amenities, but to be making electronic music there. I thought that would make for something very interesting sounding. That’s what appealed to me. And it’s a very interesting space, kind of psycho-geographically. You’re locked in this amazing dungeon that’s dark and there’s a piano and a Neve console and a wet room and comfortable couches. It puts you in the zone, a focus zone.

Do you have trouble focussing?

Yeah, I can’t be in the studio, it’s not like it’s my studio. So when I’m doing stuff at home – it’s not just the space, although working on headphones all the time can be super oppressive on my brain. Having to switch things on and off and set stuff up and be the engineer and the performer at the same time is distracting. When we talk about, like: ‘oh, music has changed so much, you can make these records at home’, that’s true, but there’s something to be said for the old school approach, where it’s just you’re there to perform, to make a record, you don’t fuss around with the guts of an operation. For me anyway, it can totally kill the vibe.

Between the three of us we probably have 20 different synths, we have a lot of the same kind of stuff. We have some rack gear. When Al got in there he slowly brought his whole studio in and he’s been working there steadily for the past year now. He’s working with other bands, he’s working with Peaking Lights... Yeasayer recorded their record there. So Al’s been there and made it his home.

You said earlier that you're a megalomaniac. How does this work?

It’s hard working with other people. Joel and I have a comfort level that is for sure because we’ve known each other for a very long time.

You did a record recently for RVNG as well, a collaborative record. James Ferraro, Laurel Halo, David Borden, who’s been around for a long time doing synth stuff. Can you talk a bit about the process and how it works? There was also someone else involved in this record.

Yes, Samuel Godin, who is David’s stepson. I was approached by RVNG and asked to do one of their FRKWYS series that pairs different generations of artists together. And I really loved David Borden, I thought he was an unsung hero in a lot of the conversations about synth music. Interestingly, he has about a minute and a half of music in The Exorcist. But he was mostly this guy who was totally doing his own thing in the 70s, he was in Ithaca, very close cohorts of Bob Moog. Moog would give his band, Mother Mallard, first test of all his music stuff as it was coming out. They were all very close and there was this network of people up there at that time. But he never moved to New York. He was basically on the outskirts of the minimalist scene. There were Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and those guys knew him and he knew them as well, but he was: ‘I’m gonna stay here in Ithaca and do my thing’. But he had some very interesting records. What’s interesting is that they were played through manually by his band or solo, there’s no sequencing. It’s almost mathematical.

How did you approach working with him?

I knew I wanted to get a lot of other people involved because I thought it would be fun to step outside this spectre of two people. I just didn’t want it to be like Tekken: ‘In this corner, David Borden’. I just got people together who I thought would be fun and also enthusiastic about synth music.

It’s a really cohesive record. With five people involved, I’m wondering how that worked.

It was all about laying back, jazz style. You have to allow other people to breathe and listen. The most interesting thing for me, doing what I do and having this improvisational approach with other people, was not overplaying. Everyone was so giving and allowed each other to do their thing that they created. When five people are all holding back it’s really cool. It’s like someone’s not supposed to take the lead or whatever. But it created a really interesting ambient sound.

The other collaboration we should talk about is Antony doing another version of “Returnal”. How did that come about?

He’s a really polite guy and he emailed Carlos and asked permission: “Can I email Dan?” That’s the nature of Antony, his character, he’s an incredible person. He saw my Sunset Corp YouTube account stuff and thought it was cool.

And what do you make of what he did with it?

It was amazing. The cool anecdote I can say about that is he tricked me. He said, “I’m gonna do this cover.” I was: “OK, cool. Are you gonna do all the parts?” Then he was: “Hey, I’m doing it at the studio in Manhattan now, you should come down.” I was: ‘Cool, I’m gonna get to watch this incredible musician play one of my songs and hang out’. So I went down there and this is cool, I get in there and he’s like: “Piano, you!” And I’m like: “Fuck!” I didn’t even know how to play the fucking song, I had no idea. But I figured it out and he was really supportive and amazing. What’s funny is how sweet to me he was, but how aggressive and intense he was with his vocal takes. He’s extremely efficient and he can basically just jump in at any point, he has an amazing memory. And the speed and the language he uses. The man is seasoned. Seeing that was incredible. I was just: “Phew, I’m too slow and stony.”

Do you think you’ll ever get that way in the studio or are you just too stoned out?

No, I’m not that stoned out. I guess I could, but the thing is he’s such a talented singer and pianist. Even on a keyboard I have to deploy so much trickery to make things sound right. I have to kind of lie and combine little bits. It’s an electronic music thing, a lot of us aren’t really natural musicians. It’s a lot of multi-tracking and lies.