Have you been enjoying the new album from The Weeknd? I have. The album sees Abel Tesfaye team up with a highly accomplished squad of producers, including pop music juggernaut Max Martin, longtime collaborator Illangelo, god-tier trap hitmaker Metro Boomin, and psychedelic indie king turned pop star Kevin Parker of Tame Impala. The one name that stands out as one having not as much mainstream recognition is Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin’s most commonly used stage name.
The inclusion of Lopatin in this project is a really interesting intersection between the underground electronic scene he’s made his name in and the mainstream pop world of superstardom that The Weeknd operates in. The fact that the two were involved in the creation of Uncut Gems, a film starring Abel Tesfaye as himself with a score done by Lopatin, makes sense in how they got in touch. Yet, seeing Oneohtrix Point Never perform on the stage during The Weeknd’s SNL performance of “Scared to Love” was still quite surreal.
Surreal is also one word that you could use to describe most of the music Lopatin makes. One of his most notable releases, under the alias of Chuck Person, is Chuck Person’s Ecco Jams Vol. 1. The premise of the album is fairly simple. Lopatin lowered the pitch and tempo of songs, in a way not much different from the chopped and screwed technique that’s been a part of hip hop history since DJ Screw started it in the 1990’s (You can read Screw’s description of the technique in this interview). Whereas Screw was doing it with Houston hip hop, Lopatin’s source material was pop music of the past. Instead of letting an entire song play out, one vocal line or musical phrase would be looped, repeated, started and stopped. It creates an effect similar to when you have one specific part of a song stuck in your head.
Lopatin called these songs ecco jams, appropriately named for their repetitive nature and how they call back to a bygone era. These are warped and fragmented memories of pop songs, recognizeable but fading. Depending on our own relation to the material, whether we previously heard these songs in their original incarnations at the height of their cultural relevance or if predated us, that nature of the memory can change. Is it our sense of nostalgia or someone else’s that makes these ecco jams so affecting? Haunting calls from Michael Jackson, Toto, Kate Bush, and Jojo returning again but “that doooooooooor shuts….just…..before..”
I believe the brilliance of the ecco jam is articulated well by Pat Beane, writing for Tiny Mixtapes (a publication that named Ecco Jams Vol. 1 the best album of the 2010s), with the following statement:
“Eccojams is a stand-in, for everyone and everything, the memories that looped in your head, the memories you wish did, the songs you dreamed of making, the times and time you wish you had.”
The importance of Ecco Jams is also worth noting in relation to its simplicity. Looping a phrase of a pop song and layering effects over it is something anyone can do. It doesn’t require much in the way of talent or taste, and therefore becomes a very democratic and accessible means of creation. With this repurposed pop patische, Ecco Jams continues to serve as an inspirational reference point for many musicians. The album is often cited, alongside the corporate mood muzak of James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual as one of the foundations of vaporwave as a genre. In the timeline of its development, Lopatin was also the first to do it. Prior to the release of Vol. 1, He had served up some ecco jams alongside progressive electronic synth compositions in the 2009 video release of Memory Vague under the Oneohtrix Point Never name, uploaded a few to his sunsetcorp Youtube channel and released some vaporwave-esque remixes of of synth-pop and Italo-Disco in three 2010 mixtapes as Games, a partner project with Joel Ford.
As it turns out, Lopatin had actually started making ecco jams as far back as 2004 and had privately released Collected Echoes 2004-2008, a collection of Vol. 1 demos and three “echos supermixes” back in 2008. On Twitter, Lopatin announced that he was planning on releasing the demos publicly to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Vol. 1, but Youtube user Sigmund Generous had already beat him to it. Both Ecco Jams and Collected Echos are linked below. If you aren’t familiar with Chuck Person, I recommend starting with Vol. 1 to get hip to the ecco before heading to Collected Echoes for the sensational supermixes.
For ecco jams in video form, peep Memory Vague and the sunsetcorp Youtube channel. As for Lopatin’s work under other monikers, I recommend starting with the late night television sampledelica of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and sunset mullet synthpop of the That We Can Play EP by Games. That’s only the tip of the iceberg of some truly amazing music.