SYNTHESIZING THE PERFECT FILM SCORE

How composer Daniel Lopatin blended past and future to give the upcoming 'Marty Supreme' its swagger

- JOSHUA ROTHKOPF

"I DON'T have a score until I'm really in touch with the essence of the film, poetically," says Lopatin, who previously made music for "Uncut Gems" and "Good Time."

DUTCH DOSCHER For The Times

Daniel Lopatin, the musician and film composer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, has an origin story, one he seems slightly amused to remember in such detail.

It takes place in an outer Boston suburb sometime in the mid-'80s, when his father, a struggling Russian Jewish immigrant who entertained at supper clubs (among other jobs), needed to buy a synthesizer. A drummer friend found one on deep discount for him: a Roland Juno-60, the same model heard on aha's bouncy “Take on Me.”

Lopatin's dad had something more pragmatic in mind. He created a makeshift carrying strap out of belts and kept the keyboard in the original box in the basement in between gigs.

“He used it essentially for what you'd imagine: these little Russian songs, accordion sounds and organ sounds and all that kind of stuff,” Lopatin, 43, says via Zoom from Electric Lady Studios, the mythic recording house in New York's Greenwich Village.

“And of course it was just this object of fascination for me because I'd go down there and it was a gadget. It was a gizmo and it had lights and levers. And then a little bit later, it goes from a pure object of enchantment to: Oh, I can make some crazy space sounds with this.”