Hear Oneohtrix Point Never’s Usher Demo

Atiba Jefferson

Hear Oneohtrix Point Never’s Usher Demo

Atiba Jefferson

On Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, Age Of, there’s a song called “The Station” that began as a demo for Usher. In our recent cover story on OPN, Daniel Lopatin explained that Usher came to an Anohni show and narrowed in on a two-minute noise interlude during the performance that Lopatin wrote, saying that was what he wanted his next album to sound like. Lopatin did some topline work intended for Usher that never got used, and then morphed it into the Age Of highlight.

Today, Lopatin took to Twitter to share the original demo for the song and gave some background on its creation. “In 2016 I was on tour with Anohni and wrote a demo then called ‘dejavu’ in a hotel room in London,” he explains. “This song became the record ‘The Station.’ The topline which was written for Usher is insinuated with the right hand melody. The final version of the song has a much different topline and a loopy coda that’s kind of a metaphor for train tracks. In 2016 it was just some nice chords and melody.”

You can download it here.

Age Of is out now via Warp.

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