Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation but resurfacing. Lopatin isn’t condemning our need for escape but, rather, exploring what happens after. The record maps a movement from weightless calm into something more grounded — not a hero’s journey, but the necessary cycle of withdrawal and return that keeps us sane in a world both overwhelming and mundane. We plummet from the watery bliss of “Lifeworld” into the mournful melancholy of “Cherry Blue” and twisted grooves of “Rodl Glide.” As always with OPN, the real collides with the unreal. Listen closely and you will hear the scrape of fingers on a fretboard, a stone sliding across a dungeon floor, the squeak of a door opening. His music has never been an abstract colour field; it has weight, edges, shadows. If R Plus Seven was all crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete was a feverish upchuck of gurgling synths, Tranquilizer feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch.
STAFF COMMENTS
Matt says: From moments of imbued calm and serenity, to bursts of white noise drama and the sound of systems collapsing, Dan Lopatin takes us on a guided tour of the present and future, using his trusty array of synths and modules as the vehicle for our mind's eye.TRACK LISTING
For Residue
Bumpy
Lifeworld
Measuring Ruins
Modern Lust
Fear Of Symmetry
Vestigel
Cherry Blue
Bell Scanner
D.I.S.
Tranquilizer
Storm Show
Petro
Rodl Glide
Waterfalls