Daniel Lopatin would like you to think of the first video from his new Oneohtrix Point Never album as “a hallucinogenic browse of a video store’s horror section.” Nate Boyce’s “morphing sculptures of inorganic life forms” remind us of something else however: old Autechre videos, an important distinction to draw considering that R Plus Seven is due out through that duo’s longtime label (Warp) on October 1st.
Here’s the statement that’d be on the wall if “Still Life (Excerpt)” were hanging at a gallery somewhere:
Incongruous surfaces come together in a nexus of fetishistic material interactions. Cryptic ads for obscure objects, fragments of sculptural forms, and remnants of material surfaces are thrown into the mix with bulging semi-solids, unctuous quasi-liquids that are agitated into an animated flow. There is no resolution other than the suspension of these discrete elements from diverging orders: liquid, mineral, organic, consumerist, etc. Their interactions simply propose a language that is looked at as it inheres in the plasticity of texture. This is the language of morphogenesis–the process of approaching form–imagined as a pulsatile latency that stops short of emergence.
Now have a closer look down below…