Photo by Caroline Mort
If you’ve ever fallen asleep with the TV on, only to wake up in the middle of the night screaming alongside a Richard Simmons commercial, then you have a general idea of the world Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford (Tigercity) weaved together on their debut LP, Channel Pressure. A concept album cut under their alias Ford & Lopatin, it’s an “imaginary soundtrack for the adventures of Joey Rogers, mild-mannered teenager of the year 2082.”
Which is to say it sounds like a fever dream; caught somewhere in the twilight zone between R. Kelly and RoboCop, and written against a backdrop of poorly dubbed VHS tapes and the kind of woozy videos Lopatin occasionally produces for his sunsetcorps YouTube channel. (Our personal favorite: his chopped & screwed “Lady In Red” clip, which rescues the original’s hypnotic hook from the Top 40 trash bin.)
In the following exclusive, Ford & Lopatin share the stories behind their skewered pop songs, from the diamond-edged mixing desk work of Guillermo Scott-Herren (Prefuse 73) to the panic attacks and pink Cadillacs that inform Joey’s midnight movie storyline:
