About

Rooted in a chance moment,  a routine visit to the dentist, lying beneath a fluorescent panel of blue skies and palm trees, Tranquilizer is a surreal, deeply textural record that asks what it means to escape into the past, and what we return to after. The album was sparked by Lopatin’s discovery that a vast archive of 90s sample CDs had vanished from the Internet Archive,  a moment that left Lopatin creatively charged.

Drawing from those salvaged sounds, Tranquilizer conjures a sonic hallucination: ambient calm twisting into digital chaos; mundane textures giving way to emotional overload. It’s a record shaped by obscurity and obsolescence. Real and unreal blur. Samples melt into static. A door creaks open inside a dream. — (via Label)

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Tranquilizer is less melancholy than you might expect from an album inspired by the idea that the cultural objects that represent our past and constitute our identities could disappear without warning. It can be wistful—just consider the limpid pianos of “Cherry Blue,” which feels almost like a Cocteau Twins homage, right down to its title; or the pulsing chimes and distant cries of “Modern Lust,” which cradles a snippet of muted jazz trumpet like some precious cargo—and it can be surprisingly graceful, given the sensory overload of its slow-motion firehose of sounds and stimuli. But in tone and mood, the album stays nimble, at least beneath its generally contemplative umbrella, taking in the sci-fi synth-scapes of “Measuring Ruins,” the Jon Hassell-does-Weather Channel funk of “Fear of Symmetry,” the elastic ambient trance of highlight “D.I.S.”

There’s humor here as well, particularly toward the end: “Rodl Glide,” the album’s penultimate track, begins with three minutes of ghostly, slow-motion R&B before abruptly unleashing a cascade of garish rave stabs and lush Detroit techno chords—a 90-second detour that may have you wondering if some other artist has hijacked your playlist. It’s the rare moment when Lopatin offers us a glimpse of fully formed musical readymades that have come from beyond the limits of his own invented universe. The winking denouement of the closing “Waterfalls” further blurs the line between his world and ours: rushing rainsticks, jazz-fusion soprano sax, Private Music mallet arps, harpsichord, even a burst of tabla. Here at the end of an album ostensibly about the precarity of the cultural commons, Lopatin sounds the opposite of worried. He sounds unburdened. Grabbing hold of what he can, while he can, he sounds like he’s having a blast. — (via Pitchfork)

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— 2LP, pressed on standard black vinyl
— Housed in gatefold sleeve

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Label: Warp Records
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Released: 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, IDM, Plunderphonics

File under: Ambient / Experimental / IDM
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