Before he was weaving spare effects into intricate, unpredictable compositions, Daniel Lopatin—the electronic artist, producer, and composer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never—was a latchkey kid wandering through Winthrop, a small Boston suburb made up of blue-collar workers, rocky beaches, and various pizza parlors. The son of Soviet immigrants, Lopatin loved to explore his surroundings on his bike, particularly the nearby shores of the Atlantic, where he could almost touch the airplanes taking off from Logan Airport. “I figured out later you could fucking swim there,” he says.
But Lopatin took a more urgent interest in what was waiting for him at home: an extensive collection of his parents’ music and the Roland JUNO-60 synthesizer his father played in bar-band gigs. “He didn’t know the power of this thing,” says Lopatin. “He just wanted it for its accordion sounds.” Still, the instrument fascinated the burgeoning musician, and by the time he was five, he had stumbled on an old VHS concert doc that showed him the real power of analog machinery. “I was completely consumed by the mystery of how these things were being made” he says. “It occurred to me that it might be something my nerdy ass would like to do.”
When he wasn’t noodling on the JUNO, Lopatin was digging through cassette tapes his dad dubbed from friends’ record collections. Few his age would admit to listening to 14-minute jazz-fusion suites on repeat, but Lopatin was not like other children. While he would eventually make friends who got him into more contemporary music for kids their age, those early discoveries became highly formative, shaping him into the musician who turned rare samples and assorted technology into idiosyncratic motifs—including, most recently, on the score to Josh Safdie’s 2025 Oscar-nominated ping-pong epic Marty Supreme.
Ahead of a global tour in support of Oneohtrix’s engrossing eleventh studio album, Tranquilizer, Lopatin ran down a selection songs that have defined and shaped him over the last four decades, from Winthrop to today.
Adobe After Effects
Sting: “We Work The Black Seam”
My parents loved Sting. So did my older sister. We had pretty much all his solo records and the Police tapes. But we also had Bring on the Night, which was about Sting’s first concert as a solo artist with his killer new band the Blue Turtles. My dad dubbed it on VHS and I’d watch it just because it was around. You had only so many pieces of media in 1987.