For two straight nights, Brooklyn was ready and prepared to get Tranquilized!
Oneohtrix Point Never had a prolific 2025, dropping his latest album Tranquilizer to high fan and critical acclaim, and creating the score for Josh Safdie's latest picture, Marty Supreme. But producer Daniel Lopatin is not stopping there.
While the world tour for his latest album has almost run its course, these last two "home shows" at this Red Hook, Brooklyn venue were the only U.S. gigs on the tour.
The night started with an opening set from Tyondai Braxton, who you may know as one of the former members of progressive math rock outfit Battles. But on his own, he is an experimental electronic producer, specializing in ambient, dark drone, and glitch.
And from the moment Braxton took the stage, the audience was locked in a trance. For about fifteen minutes, without a steady beat in sight, people were swaying and closing their eyes, as certain sounds were roaming around the venue. It felt like the sub bass could break the windows at certain points. The space he created during the first part of his set was an impenetrable field of drones and small sample bits. At parts, it reminded me of earlier Oneohtrix works like Betrayed in the Octagon and Zones Without People.
Eventually, Broxton was creating his own beat loops and once he finally introduced a beat, the vibes were getting a little more lively. Moving towards an ambient techno direction towards the back end of his performance, the 40-minute set was a great introduction of what would come later.
At a few minutes past nine, it was time for the main event: Oneohtrix Point Never perfoming alongside his longtime collaborator and visual aritist, Freeka Tet. The two artists shared the stage, with Freeka contrbuting both practical and digital visuals accompanied by Daniel's compositions. And the audio-visual experience that both Daniel and Freeka present is an impressive feat to pull together.
The set started loud, opening with "Nil Admirari" off of 2010's Returnal, as the whole room filled with smoke machines and strobes. Things were starting off hazy; it was difficult to know where you were at some points. But as the set further progressed, the audience started to make sense of the visual elements contributing to the show.
The digital aspect of Freeka's visuals is self explanatory. There are two LED boards contributing to the show: a large one behind Daniel and Freeka, and a tiny 4:4 panel to the side of the stage. Much of the digital elements come from the album visualizers and videos, but visual samples come via old cartoons and 2D wall-to-wall scroller retro-computer games.
The digital elements melded together with the practical in a seamless fashion. At one end of the stage, a tiny model home was standing and miniature television screens were playing the visuals. Meanwhile, Freeka was adding different practical elements to the "home" with nearly every song transition for the audience to witness.
You could see him changing the lighting design or camera angles around the structure. At one point, he started bowing smoke into the home, making it seem like it was on fire. Another moment, he added a tiny stage to the miniature living room containing small replicas of Daniel's equipment and what seemed to be a tiny Oneohtrix figurine lying underneath the table. The visual show was all-encompassing, and it was a treat to witness how far it unraveled itself as the set progressed.
As for the setlist, Daniel made sure to include pieces from his entire catalogue, but the bulk of the material came from Tranquilizer and the heavily-acclaimed R+7. And the elements that Daniel added on his setup to these compositions breathed new life into them.
The start of the show had him combining many of his older tunes with the new sounds he's mustered in the past few years. He segued the opening track into "Vestigel" and already, people were feeling the rift between the transcendental synth and drone layers paid up against these glitchy sample patterns. The combination of these sounds was something that added more perspective to the impenetrable, trippy atmosphere.
A few cuts from R+7 followed this, including "Along," "Still Life," and "Americans," and it felt like a much-needed throwback from the very loud opening movement. Then, Daniel presented a series of Tranqilizer cuts that sounded completely different than how they were presented on the album. There's more detail worked into these version, be it newer synth passages, stronger dynamics, or simply giving things more time to breathe. It felt like hearing the album for the first time again.
During "Lifeworld," the tiny television screens were playing Daniel's self-directed video as Freeka was changing the camera angles and lighting around the miniature house. On "Bumpy," things were rotating between the practical and the digital, switching up the perspectives on how the cartoon snippets were presented. Maybe the strongest part of the visual show came during "Storm Show," as the tiny screens were playing clips of thunderstorms, while Freeka was shining the strobe from his flashlight and blowing smoke into the structure.
After closing the main set with "Rodl Glide," the two walked off stage briefly before returning for a four song encore.
Starting with an new rendition, or variation rather, of the title song off Replica, the much faster, glitchy, sporadic piano samples feels like it's the same tune from the album for a new world. The most intense moments in the show came up during "Where Does Time Go" and "Mutant Standard," the latter of which hurt my eyes with how much strobes bombarded us. And finally, closing the set and cooling down with "Chrome Country" made the entire experience feel complete, making it clear the transcendent journey was about to end.
Oneohtrix Point Never's flexibility and seamless practice of melding glitch with ambient, plunderphonic with drone, and progressive synth with noise, makes him one of the more standout producers in the experimental electronic scene. His live show alongside Freeka Tet at Pioneer Works proved that Daniel still has a lot more fuel left in the cannon, and is unafraid to experiment live.
If you ever go into a Oneohtrix Point Never concert thinking you know what to expect – think again, because his live sound will surprise and surpass your expectations.
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