A sound and visual storyteller, Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never embraced his audience with a deep, enrapturing performance.

A heavy crowd descended on a Sunday for a late night at Hindley Street Music Hall on the coldest night in Adelaide this year, with the floor full of people, Oneohtrix Point Never has a dedicated following, and from his Illuminate Festival performance, you can see why.

Receiving ubiquitous support from critics and musicians alike, Lopatin was awarded best soundtrack for the movie Good Time in 2017 at the Canes Film Awards, wrote the soundtrack for the 2019 feature film Uncut Gems and worked with the likes of FKA-Twigs, Iggy Pop and The Weekend to name a few recent projects.

Lopatin took his audience on a journey, dividing the night into four parts. Allowing the audience to come up to breathe inbetween immersive sound and visual scapes.

Using a backdrop of mesh-like wiring and teardrop framing, Lopatin pairs lighting patterns and sound to create blasts of abstract shapes that connect to the music seamlessly.

The music traverses a range of genres, from orchestral tones to pop and heavy, with new-age electronic tones blending past and future sounds throughout the show. The playfulness and nostalgia of reflecting cartoon images and innocence of creating imagery with characters such as Tinkerbell is flipped through the night into dark states of constantly running away from a train that is chasing you down, over and over, through to moments of deep reflection and darkness until you are thrown back by bright lights flashing into the crowd re-focusing your attention that felt like you were forever gazing in a trance at the stage.

Beautifully tied into Lopatin’s work is the support act CORIN whom created an ethereal sonic space, with imagery by video artist and director Tristan Jalleh, the two artists worked together to produce imagrey of the changing moon, soaring women and hard concrete structures emulating flowers which was juxtaposed by rolling water. This performance was thoughtful, and engaging. CORIN sounds flow seamlessly from traditional elements to a kind of grime trance.

Photos: Saige Prime