Daniel Lopatin records as Oneohtrix Point Never — a name that is itself a joke about soft-rock radio, a verbal scramble of Boston's Magic 106.7. Across two decades he has turned that joke into one of electronic music's more unlikely careers: a noise-scene cassette artist who became the Safdie brothers' composer, an executive producer on a Weeknd No. 1, and — by accident more than design — a progenitor of vaporwave.

## Formation and the cassette years

Born July 25, 1982 in Massachusetts to Russian-Jewish emigrants, both with musical backgrounds, Lopatin inherited his father's record collection and his Roland Juno-60 — the instrument that anchors the early records. He played synthesizer in high-school groups with Joel Ford, attended Hampshire College, then moved to Brooklyn for graduate study in archival science at Pratt Institute, a field he credits with shaping his practice. The Brooklyn noise scene absorbed him; early work surfaced under group names like Infinity Window and Astronaut before *Betrayed in the Octagon* (2007) appeared on Deception Island as a hand-numbered cassette credited to "Magic Oneohtrix Point Never." Two more synth albums (*Zones Without People*, *Russian Mind*, both 2009) and the No Fun compilation *Rifts* — The Wire's second-best album of 2009 — closed the era.

## The eccojam detonation

Beginning July 19, 2009, Lopatin uploaded what he called "eccojams" to a YouTube channel named sunsetcorp: seconds of '80s and '90s pop — Chris de Burgh's "The Lady in Red" on "nobody here," Fleetwood Mac on "angel" — slowed, looped, and echoed until a corporate artifact sounded like a séance. Many were assembled in GoldWave at an office job between 2004 and 2008. *Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1* followed on The Curatorial Club in August 2010 in a run of 100 cassettes. Pitchfork's retrospective called it "the most influential cassette tape of the 21st century"; the lineage from sunsetcorp to vaporwave is the record's most-cited fact, though the "inventor" framing overstates what was a collectively crystallized genre.

## Software, Replica, and the Warp decade

In 2011 Games — his duo with Ford — renamed themselves Ford & Lopatin and opened Software Recording Co. under Mexican Summer; their *Channel Pressure* was its first release. *Replica* (November 2011), built from the audio of '80s and '90s TV commercials, was his first studio-recorded album and his statement of method: "looking for old things that are meaningful," then restructuring them into "new poetry." Warp signed him in 2013; *R Plus Seven* replaced samples with a plastic MIDI orchestra. The pattern since has been one dead medium per record: alt-metal adolescence on *Garden of Delete* (2015) — rolled out through the Ezra/Kaoss Edge internet fiction after real pop songwriters declined to take part; early music and harpsichord on *Age Of* (2018), staged as the alien-intelligence "concertscape" MYRIAD at Park Avenue Armory; FM-radio formats on the self-titled *Magic Oneohtrix Point Never* (2020), co-executive-produced by Abel Tesfaye; and vanished '90s sample-CD libraries on *Tranquilizer* (2025), a record that exists because an Internet Archive collection disappeared.

## Film and pop

The Safdie brothers recruited him by mood board for *Good Time* (2017); the score — ending in the Iggy Pop collaboration "The Pure and the Damned" — won the Cannes Soundtrack Award. The method, per NPR, is contrast: the film stays realistic while the music stays "fantastical," Vangelis-descended serenity applied to panic. *Uncut Gems* (2019) wrapped Moog and choir around the same trick; he executive-produced John Medeski's Alice Coltrane–briefed score for *The Curse* (2023); and *Marty Supreme* (2025), Josh Safdie's first solo feature, earned an Oscar shortlist and Pitchfork's first-ever Best New Music tag for a film score.

The pop track runs parallel: Tesfaye called after *Good Time* ("I'd heard your music before, but now I understand"), and Lopatin became a fixture of the Weeknd's circle — co-writing and producing on *After Hours*, performing on SNL, serving as musical director for the Super Bowl LV halftime show, executive-producing *Dawn FM*, and co-producing on *Hurry Up Tomorrow* plus co-scoring its film. Other production work spans ANOHNI's *Hopelessness*, David Byrne's *American Utopia*, FKA twigs, and DJ Earl.

## What the record shows

His own vocabulary — "eccojams," "Compressionism," "concertscape" — keeps pace with the aliases: OPN for albums, sunsetcorp for jams, Chuck Person for the tape. In October 2023 the dormant sunsetcorp channel woke to promote *Again*, his "speculative autobiography." The open questions are the usual seams: album counts disagree, birth details differ by source, Software's status is dormant-not-dead, and the sunsetcorp revival's intent is unresolved. What is consistent is the method: memory treated as material, obsolescence treated as an instrument, and calm music placed where it should cause the most alarm.

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*