His Warp debut, R Plus Seven, often feels like a microcosm of that approach; these shape-shifting songs hold together more because of Lopatin's bold sonic palette than any unifying concept. Aside from the opening track, "Boring Angel," he downplays the drones that made up the heart of his earlier work (and Replica, to a lesser extent) in favor of bright, briskly applied tones that, on the surface, seem like the opposite of his usual modus operandi. This fragmentation could be seen as a variation of Replica's choppy recontextualizing, though the results are dizzying rather than hypnotic: "Americans" hops from environmental sounds to zapping synths to cheery strings to choral vocals in what feels like the musical equivalent of a series of smash cuts.
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