Top 44 Oneohtrix Point Never Quotes

I think nostalgia used purely for the sake of emotional reminiscing is extremely boring.

I don’t think I could make a good film, but I could definitely score a good film.

I’ve lost so many gigs composing commercial or television music because I can’t repress my inclination to work against conventions.

All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.

I need my ‘art work’ or ‘entertainment work’ or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

Kitsch is very important to me.

I knew my whole life that I had to make ends meet or I would be ashamed of myself. I had a lot of pressure from my parents. So that’s where my vision comes from. It’s not to be a great artist, it’s always to be like, ‘Dad, look, I didn’t let you down.’

I was born in ’82 and there were these bizarre wars, explained through mass media in ways that made no sense. I remember watching the Gulf War through night vision. That was sold and propagated as a showbusiness moment for the news.

Before puberty, it seems like I was more or less smiling a lot. I was really outgoing and wanted to have a happy life.

I love Ableton’s vocoder and Operator for basic side subs and general low-end.

It’s not like I actually understand the properties of sound.

Anything that’s too self-assured just makes me nervous.

Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.

O.P.N. has always been about reaching for some kind of liminal state in which opposing aesthetic forces become entangled and confused and equal.

I’m predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There’s no authentic or organic.

I’m super into dudes like Megazord, Jon Rafman, Rasmus Emanuel Svensson, Tabor Robak, and Michael Willis to name a few.

I loved Alva Noto’s ‘Xerrox, Vol. 3’ a lot. It might be my favorite of his records. I must admit, I was bummed to see him say he was surprised by how emotional the record came out, as if he was ashamed. But there’s something perfect about that.

My friend and I were in a band together and we used to always refer it it as ‘floor-core,’ meaning that we would sit on the floor and play stuff.

I love seeing Tim Hecker perform because the experience truly shakes me.

Far Behind’ is a single from Candlebox’s self-titled record from 1993. The record came out on Madonna’s Maverick imprint and went quadruple platinum, regardless of how much it sucked.

I was never totally sold on this idea that I’m just a musician. I wanted to be the Tim Burton of music.

I would love to perform in an Amangiri hotel somewhere. Just off to the side like a piano man, while people drink and eat.

Growing up, I wanted to write films and make films. Even as I took this detour and stayed in the music world, I still think in terms of ‘What is in this room? What is the shot? Who are the characters? What is the conversation here?’ My sense of pacing is very filmlike, it’s not musical.

The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I’m a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don’t have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.

I saw Double Leopards play at my school and realized there were other ways to approach noisy music that weren’t necessarily aggressive. That became a very important concept for me as a musician. I don’t think I would have been that interested in creating and performing my own music if it wasn’t for this group.

It’s stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I’ve solved that problem I’m not going to feel like I’ve achieved too much.

I really don’t care if anyone thinks I’m special or not, I just want to be able to live my life without thinking about money all the time, or where I’m going to get it.

I need weird breakages to happen for music to feel true to life, and I think that also applies to good film scores.

To me, ‘Garden of Delete’ is a way of describing the idea that good things can bloom out of a negative situation. All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever.

That’s a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: ‘Hey, isn’t it something that’s in bad taste?’

OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.

I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That’s always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.

I love thinking of music of this way to access some kind of illogical realm filled with all kinds of aberrations and weird stuff. It’s not implicit in music to have a story, so it creates this incredible potential for vague stories.

I’ve always been obsessed with the grain of the human voice. It’s the ultimate instrument, there’s this whole level of virtuosity and poetry, a sort of athleticism, of controlling your voice.

I’m not much of a crier, actually. You know, I tend to cry and get sappy on planes.

The way I think about things or hear things in my head is actually much closer to acoustic instruments. I don’t have weird synthesized fantasy of music in my head.

Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don’t exist.

Yeah, I guess generally I don’t want things ever to be easy. While there’s some danger of doing something that loses your personal stamp on things, I’d rather take the chance of doing that and do something slightly uncomfortable or hard for myself.

As a movie fan, I remember Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender and the sort of energy around ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ and the jump from ‘Reservoir Dogs’ to ‘Pulp Fiction,’ and how everybody was stoked on Quentin’s career.

Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it’s very difficult and you really have to consider what you’re putting someone through.

The problem with depicting what’s weird and what isn’t is that it’s got to this point of near total oversaturation. There’s definitely a threshold at which that language and experience becomes tedious. How can something be weird if everything is apparently weird?

Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is… it’s the scene with Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first ‘Batman,’ the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.

Eccojams are a very simple exercise where I just take music I like, and I loop up a segment, slow it down, and put a bunch of echo on it – just to placate my desire to hear things I like without things I don’t.

Film work can be anything from just really hard and stressful and you’re subjected to really weird deadlines to really draconian and weird and disconnected. You’re working in service of the thing, and that can be really amazing for everyone involved, or be kind of just a waste of time.