Workshop with Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never): Electronic Music, Film Scoring, and Production (February '26)

In February 2026, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) led a four-week School of Song workshop about listening, identity, composition, and collaboration. Across the series, Daniel treats songwriting and production less as fixed disciplines than as ways of sharpening perception: learning how to pay attention, recognize emotional resonance, and develop a clearer relationship to your own taste and instincts.

Class 1: Becoming (an Artist) begins with listening itself: what Daniel calls “the audible landscape of reality.” The class focuses on attention as the core artistic skill, hearing texture, context, contrast, and emotional implication in the ordinary world, and learning how to turn those observations into music. Daniel moves through tape experiments, improvisation, hip-hop production, film scores, and early electronic music, connecting them through ideas of mimicry, recycling, and transformation. Throughout the lecture, he returns to the paired archetypes of the Fool and the Hermit: staying open, playful, and exploratory in the studio while sharpening your sensitivity outside of it. 

Class 2: Rooms looks at the idea of songs as spaces rather than linear stories. Instead of treating a track like a journey from verse to chorus to climax, Daniel explores composition as environmental design: rooms, hallways, textures, perspectives, and objects available for your attention inside a shared space. Daniel then demonstrates how to put this conceptual framework into practice inside the DAW through a detailed breakdown of one of his own tracks, showing how ideas about mood, space, and perspective actually emerge during the compositional process.

Class 3: Constructing "Audentity" centers on what Daniel calls “audentity:” the cumulative sonic identity formed through repeated creative decisions over time. Using a detailed walkthrough of his own discography, from the synth experiments of Rifts and Returnal through Eccojams, Replica, R Plus Seven, Garden of Delete, Age Of, and Again, Daniel breaks artistic development into three interacting categories: Influence, Intention, and Implementation. The class explores how artists build coherent worlds without becoming stylistically trapped, how limitations can lead to artistic breakthroughs, and how artists can combine their influences to create a sonic world of their own. Along the way, Daniel discusses his own influences: library music, Enya, John Carpenter, DJ Screw, Georges Perec, collage, and world-building, using each as a way to think through how your artistic identity evolves across years of accumulated decisions.

Class 4: Service to Others turns outward toward collaboration, production, and film scoring. Framed through the metaphor of a lighthouse and the Queen of Pentacles, the class focuses on what it means to create conditions where collaborators can do their best work. Using examples from his soundtrack work, Daniel explores film scoring as a practice of support rather than self-expression: responding to image, shaping emotional pacing without over-signaling, and learning how musical time bends around cinematic time. The second half of the lecture expands those ideas into music production and collaboration more broadly, focusing on how to create environments where performers can take risks, how to recognize when a demo has real energy, and how rejected ideas often find new life elsewhere. Throughout the class, collaboration is framed less as compromise and more as learning how to support someone else’s instincts without losing your own perspective in the process.

Here are some words from the students who took this class: