His electronica, a blend of past and future, gives 'Marty Supreme' its swagger

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Daniel Lopatin, the musican and film composer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, has an origin story, one he seems slightly amused to remember in such detail.It takes place in an outer Boston suburb sometime in the mid-’80s, when his father, a struggling Russian-Jewish immigrant who entertained at supper clubs (among other jobs), needed to buy a synthesizer.A drummer friend found one on deep discount for him: a Roland Juno-60, the same model heard on a-ha’s bouncy “Take on Me.”Lopatin’s dad had something more pragmatic in mind.

He created a makeshift carrying strap out of belts and kept the keyboard in the original box in the basement in between gigs.“He used it essentially for what you’d imagine: these little Russian songs, accordion sounds and organ sounds and all that kind of stuff,” Lopatin, 43, says via Zoom from Electric Lady Studios, the mythic recording house in New York’s Greenwich Village.“And of course it was just this object of fascination for me because I’d go down there and it was a gadget.It was a gizmo and it had lights and levers.

And then a little bit later, it goes from a pure object of enchantment to: Oh, I can make some crazy space sounds with this.”Lopatin has since evolved from crazy space sounds (not by much, thankfully, nor from his boyish enthusiasm) over two decades of acclaimed releases — first on self-produced cassettes and CDs, then for a major label, Warp, collaborating with the Weeknd, Iggy Pop and David Byrne along the way.His bubbling synth creations have been associated with so many microgenres, including hypnagogic pop, vaporwave and plunderphonic, that he’s come to invent some of his own, like his slowed-down, mantra-adjacent “eccojams.”A newish frontier for Lopatin has been film scoring, chiefly for the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny.

Those manic rushes of major-chord euphoria in their hyperventilating c...