Oneohtrix Point Never Live at Walt Disney Concert Hall

Electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, brought some magic and mystery to Disney Hall with music and art performance, MYRAID. The one-and-a-half-hour long show featured surreal visuals, guest performers and dancers that either blew away the audience or at least left them with a furrowed brow.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is most known as the home of the LA Philharmonic. It’s a real treat to see any performance in this stunning hall, which is just as impressive inside as it is on the outside. For a four-piece group like Oneohtrix Point Never, the steeply raised seats and added backstage panels made the experience feel that much more intimate. Large white panels with intentional shapes served as the backdrop, with the massive resident organ peering through every so slightly. As the performers took their seats around 8:30—a grand piano, two keys/synthesizer stations and a drum set all lined up in equal view—the lights dimmed.

Gargling, thundering sounds started as the lights flashed behind the backlit performers. The harpsichord-heavy intro of “Age Of” juxtaposed eerily with the static-y, deep synths added in periodically. Visuals came on to the screen of what looked like futuristic sea creatures with some anime crossover, all disintegrating to some kind of space dust. The visuals throughout the performance were quite surreal and futuristic, bringing to mind shifting between alternate universes.

The live show consisted of songs off the latest album, Age Of, which was released on June 1 of this year via Warp Records. The album as a whole has a utopian feel to it, but Lopatin adds his twists and turns in utopia with added electronic glitches and warps. A good many of the songs are purely instrumental, but the addition of heavily processed vocals in songs like “Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen” and “Babylon” give a glimpse into James Blake’s co-production of the album. The crowd cheered for the more accessible songs like “The Station” and “Black Snow,” which ANOHNI guest tracks. For “Black Snow,” five dancers entered the stage slowly, wearing masks, red leotards and cowboy hats. Their aesthetic was quite disjointed, as they appeared to perform almost a loose cheerleading routine and then a country dance tapping their heels before exiting the stage the way they came in. During the last two tracks, guest cellist Kelsey Lu took the stage, the first track being more experimental and the last offering more melodic, rich cello lines.

Between a few of the songs, a booming voice would enter as the lights shone on the hanging sculptures above the audience, causing everyone to look both at the sculpture and the shadow. They didn’t resemble much, perhaps another futuristic sea creature, but the one of the right had a noticeable key hole. Lopatin’s only interactions with the crowd were the occasional “thank you” between songs. At the end of “Never Ending Happening,” a Bill Faye cover, the crowd stood in applause and awaited anxiously for an encore. The ensemble took the stage once more for a performance of the instrumental “Child of Rage” before closing with the soft, swelling “Chrome Country,” the final track from R Plus Seven.

Lopatin collaborated with Nate Boyce, who provided sculptures and videos as well as a group of collaborators who advised on lighting, choreography and more. According to the program, MYRIAD “explores the tropes of our age through digital ephemera, television, film, videogames and poetry with a view to distilling some kind of meaning, some consistent idea of what it might mean to be human, from the things that we used to have over time to record the idiosyncrasies of our existence.” The description gives the audience some insight into what they just experienced, but like an abstract expressionist painting, it appears the that MYRIAD as a whole is meant for us to just feel something.

Setlist:

1. Intro
2. Age Of
3. Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen
4. RayCats
5. Toys 2
6. Babylon
7. Manifold
8. We’ll Take It
9. The Station
10. Love in the Time of Lexapro
11. Warning
12. Same
13. Black Snow
14. Last Known Image of a Song
15. Never Ending Happening (Bill Fay cover)

Encore:

1. Child of Rage
2. Chrome Country