#Lorenzo Senni

[grrlmusic]

Lorenzo Senni

[fhuzee]

Lorenzo Senni ‎– EVOLVER

[knightofleo]

Lorenzo Senni | Discipline of Enthusiasm

[grrl-beetle]

Move in Silence (Only Speak When It's Time to Say Checkmate)

[elixir]

The Shape of Trance to Come by Lorenzo Senni

[daily-coloring]

¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U | Boiler Room: Tokyo

[sneek-m]

"Think Big" by Lorenzo Senni [Scacco Matto, 2020]

[noisehellokitty]

Quantum Jelly by Lorenzo Senni

[somanythings2021]

LORENZO SENNIが手がけたMonclerの７０周年のショー。

記事

彼は昔から、ファッションブランドと仕事をしてきたようだ。

FENDI　2021SSも彼が音楽を担当している

[z-zzzzzzz]

[grrlmusic]

Lorenzo Senni

[grrl-bubble-acid]

Lorenzo Senni - Win In The Flat World

[thoughtportrait]

Sometimes tagging something for 10+ years has its perks

[iamlisteningto]

Lorenzo Senni’s Scacco Matto

[tim-official]

"just looping one arpeggio can't be art" people when the lorenzo senni comes on

[schismusic]

The dark Age of love — Oneohtrix Point Never and the inexorable passage of time

Around the time that I stopped actively using this blog is when I started getting really into Oneohtrix Point Never. For reference Garden of Delete had been out for about three years at that point and it felt like the wait for Age of — then untitled — was endless. I remember accidentally coming across R Plus Seven in 2016 on a Telegram channel dedicated to vaporwave and downloading it almost on a whim, not exactly knowing what to expect (if I had to guess, retrospectively, what I expected lay very close to Andy Stott's Luxury Problems: a record, mind you, I only listened to for the first time three years ago!), and finding it somewhat impenetrable. It took me a full year of beating my head against its side to be able to make heads or tails of it and when it finally clicked it felt like translating hieroglyphics off of the Rosetta stone. Five years later than the rest of the world, but still.

As I type this I am listening to a live recording of some sort of reworked version of Zones Without People, title track from one of the very first OPN records I bought. I have almost all of the big releases, no compilations yet: the ones missing are Betrayed in the Octagon, Russian Mind and the last one. This new-OPN angle he approached it from makes it insanely compelling to me, it almost turns into a cut from Garden of Delete but not quite, it still has that kosmische sense of larger-than-life melody that his earlier records had but it gives it the Casio makeover (that fake-ass piano sequence doubling the main melody hits). And like most of OPN's later material it's a combination of previous elements, as tasteful as it is, but it's not necessarily retreading.

A while back I stumbled across R Plus Seven again and as I was listening to it, and for reference R Plus Seven is the kind of record I can listen to without it being on, I know the stop-and-go's and the breaks and the melody lines and all the weird shit going on so I'm pretty sure it was on in the background while I was doing something else and it was still that good, don't let anyone tell you otherwise — anyways as I was listening to it I remember thinking "holy shit, OPN is forty". It almost feels like yesterday to me — this guy being forty, using his Instagram profile like any tech-savvy millennial did, he even replied to an Instagram story where I played the guitar riff from Ezra to promote a live show my old band had to play. Lorenzo Senni did the same a couple times when I replied to his stories, I was lucky enough to meet him in real life when he played my city in 2018. Ironically enough Lorenzo Senni is also forty now. Not entirely sure as to what makes forty the exact age when I start to think of people as "getting old", considering I am going for twentyfive and I am closer to being forty than I am to the time I learned how to read and write, but something clicks in my head where someone like Steve Albini, RIP, was "still somewhat young" but at the same time I look at a picture of current-day Oneohtrix Point Never, then at the thumbnail for his VICE Motherboard interview (year of our Lord two-thousand-and-nine, Returnal had just come out, the quantum leap that was Replica yet to even appear in the corner of our eyes), and instinctively break out in cold sweat. What is it about aging that only fucks us up when the people aging are the ones closer to us, from a birth year point of view?

This conversation is even more topical considering the core gist of OPN's recorded output so far orbits around not aging, per se, as much as it does memory. And, of course, it's easy to think "oh right, memory, like Memory Vague", and that is absolutely correct: no surprise that exactly the Memory Vague DVD would include as liner notes such a stunningly articulate manifesto specifically on the main preoccupations of the project at that specific time:

Embedded in collective memory are unique instances of the personal

No commercial work is outside of the reach of artistic reclamation

Likewise no artistic project is outside the reach of commercial implications

Furthermore

It is in the weird stasis of in-between zones that this polarized system breaks down

This zone contains secrets that inform the future via exploding the past

[Nostalgia's failure is a decoding force]

Nostalgia is transformative because nostalgia is innately vague

A memory that desires to be total and sublime, but can never be

Hard to find anything more accomplished than this as far as an explanation goes: this puts OPN on a far more conceptual and performance-oriented level than, say, Autechre, with whom many stupid people like Demented Burrocacao (actually, in all seriousness, he's an excellent writer, but I simply cannot see what he sees in regards to OPN supposedly being a bad Autechre copycat. If you understand Italian, go read his Tony Levin interview on Rolling Stone: it's acute journalism and incredible writing rolled into one neatly-sized package) seem to find more than one tie. If anything, it might be closer to Boards of Canada, but then again OPN deals more in the uncanny than he does in outright "weird" or "eerie" à la Mark Fisher, like a secret third thing that sidesteps all inherent connotations of pleasure/displeasure and reaches directly into the distorted without any quality connotations. But most relevant for the purposes of this piece, the impossibility of totality appears surprisingly close to old age: ideally, the ripest point of our experiences, but in practice we are trapped within a body that simply will not do what we want it to.

In turn, this makes the existence of a record like Magic especially interesting. A project entirely dedicated to "inform the future via exploding the past" looks back and — well — keeps exploding the past, but in a slower, more focused manner. I'm assuming Abel Tesfaye gleefully putting his own money in the project might have had something to do with it? Not saying that it's a bad thing. It just feels like yet another detour in the project, one that seems to have come to full fruition with Again in the eyes of most listeners: self-portrait in audio form — and the phrase "self-portrait" openly emerges in the Rolling Stone Italia review of Again, but at the same time it's hard to watch the music video to Long Road Home and not see all of the references being made to previous OPN aesthetics (such as the name of the album being the project's first moniker, but also: what if we kissed in the R Plus Seven room? And what if we were the two creatures that blend into one another on the cover of Garden of Delete, one of whom looks suspiciously similar to Yves Tumor and the other to the creatures in the Black Snow music video? Do I need to start wearing a tinfoil hat?). At the time of its release, Age of felt like a bit of a misfire to me: something that squandered a potentially interesting concept to a surprising lack of focus, a blemish heretofore unprecedented in OPN. It might still be his weakest specifically because of that, unfortunately for the good tracks and great moments on there — Black Snow and Prurient hopping on a weirded-out post-trance banger, just to name one of each.

Point being: I miss Oneohtrix Point Never, or rather I miss his music hitting me from left field at every turn, or rather — possibly — I miss being able to feel that surprising punch in music. Or maybe all I really miss is not being closer to forty than I am to the age I learned how to read and write. Luckily, there is one thing I am still close to. I started listening to full records with attention and intention at age twelve, thirteen years ago. I started confronting records that I felt were way out of my league the very day I turned fifteen, when I received a copy of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and kept doing so with R Plus Seven and elseq 1-5, and keep doing so with Bitches Brew and Mingus Ah Um. Maybe as long as I keep the ability to be surprised, a sense of childlike wonder, I might still be able to not turn into a grumpy old motherfucker that yells at clouds; I might still be able to explode the past, for someone else to inform the future.

(Two days ago, this blog turned ten. I believe it's only fitting that I post this piece now)