Garden of Delete

Following the release of his 2013 debut on Warp, R Plus Seven, Daniel Lopatin was invited to support the American alternative rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden on their 2014 joint amphitheater tour as a replacement for the American group Death Grips after they had unexpectedly announced their disbandment. With the approval of Nine Inch Nails' frontman Trent Reznor and Soundgarden's guitarist Kim Thayil, Lopatin performed half-hour opening sets of self-described "cyberdrone" to surprised and vexed arena rock crowds. The tour prompted him to revisit the grunge music of his teenage years, evoking his memories of adolescence and puberty, and Soundgarden on their 2014 arena tour After completing the tour and returning to Brooklyn, Lopatin rented a small, windowless basement studio and began working on sketches for an album. Wanting to experiment with pop music, he initially conceived Garden of Delete in its untitled form as a project incorporating and manipulating samples of unheard vocal outtakes from singers such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, which he speculated as being "cold-cut ends" and "dollar-fifty-a-pound bullshit". Unable to contact any managers, he chose to "just pretend to be them", and the initial concept was mostly discarded in favor of new themes of "dealing with puberty and how your pubescent body is essentially the staging area for all this mutation". Lopatin was additionally inspired by an exhibition by the American visual artist and earlier collaborator Jacob Ciocci, featuring a virtual Max/MSP instrument which sporadically played minuscule clips from a multitude of amateur metal drummers sourced from YouTube. He aimed to orient his new music around drums, as his work had previously focused solely on melodies. The isolated recording environment equally encouraged an abrasive and dense sound compared with his earlier work, with Lopatin saying that he "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==

In interviews during and after the promotional campaign of Garden of Delete, Lopatin stated that his intentions were to "make a hyperactive/depressive record" the album variously draws inspiration from metal, top 40 radio, industrial, alternative rock and music from the scene and rave subcultures. The album prominently incorporates digital simulations of guitars like the Chapman Stick and electric guitars played with shredding techniques. It is the first Oneohtrix Point Never album with vocals and lyrics, rendered using the software instrument Chipspeech which allowed Lopatin to write abstract phrases and vocalize them chromatically. Heather Phares of 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 nostalgically described the album's sound palette as being "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 release of Garden of Delete was preceded by an Internet promotional campaign and alternate reality game (ARG), which critics described as enigmatic and surreal, devised by Lopatin in collaboration with friends. The album was initially announced in August 2015 via a series of online posts originating from Lopatin's website, including a cryptic PDF letter to his fans serving as an introduction to the ARG, which were gradually followed by further material. The project sketched out a loose fictional backstory involving Lopatin himself, an acne-ridden teenage alien blogger named Ezra, and an imaginary "hypergrunge" band from the 1990s called Kaoss Edge. The websites in the ARG included Ezra's supposed 1990s blog and Kaoss Edge's "official" website, as well as fabricated interviews, characterized Twitter accounts and teaser videos. Kaoss Edge's main website contained a repository of MIDI files (many of which were stems from the album), along with a detailed band biography, subpages with fictional elaborations on the band and a fictional discography, all of which contained hyperlinks to web pages for unaffiliated entities and other obscure information scattered around the site to convey a disorienting Web 1.0 environment. Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork 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". The album's first single, "I Bite Through It", was released on September 3, 2015 and was followed later that month with users unlocking the Kaoss Edge site which had been hinted at on Ezra's blog, with Lopatin encouraging fans to create their own songs from the site's MIDI files. The 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. Finally, in October 2016, Lopatin premiered a music video for "Animals" directed by Rick Alverson and starring Val Kilmer at UCLA's Hammer Museum exhibition "Ecco: The Videos of Oneohtrix Point Never and Related Works". ==Critical reception==

Garden of Delete received generally positive reviews from critics, generally describing it as a radical stylistic change from his previous releases. AllMusics Heather Phares called the album "some of Lopatin's most intellectually engaging music as well as some of his funniest, darkest, and most cathartic". Kyle Carney of Exclaim! wrote that the record manages to sound accessible despite its complexities, calling it "a sound collage like no other". Writing for Consequence, Sasha Geffen called the album "OPN's most emotional work to date and also his most ridiculous", writing that "[i]ts tragedy is bound up with its humor; its sublimity comes from the places where it feels the most broken." For The Line of Best Fit, Jennifer Johnson wrote, "GOD isn't about sensory pleasure. It's about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing." She concluded, "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 Guardians Paul McInnes wrote, "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, Joseph Burnett in Dusted magazine wrote that "at its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Deletes 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==

Sample credits • "SDFK" contains samples of "Brown" by Grotus and "Dream in White on White" by John Luther Adams. • "Child of Rage" contains samples of "My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose" by Michael Finnissy, "Cruel When Complete" by Dome and the documentary Child of Rage: A Story of Abuse. • "Freaky Eyes" contains a sample of "Am I Supposed to Let It by Again (Above the Covers)" by Roger Rodier. • "No Good" contains a sample of "Return of the Knödler Show" by Hans Reichel. ==Personnel==

Credits adapted from AllMusic. • Daniel Lopatin – producer, artwork • Paul Corley – mixing, additional production • Dave Kutch – mastering • Sebastian Krüger – photography • Andrew Stasser – design • Beau Thomas – vinyl cut ==Charts==