Experimental musician and composer Daniel Lopatin may be best known for his groundbreaking work as Oneohtrix Point Never, but under his own name, he's established himself as an in-demand composer and collaborator. With these projects, he expands on the different strains of his artistic vision as well as his talent for balancing high art with pop culture artifacts like video games, science fiction, anime, and advertising. He's equally comfortable working with Iggy Pop, DJ Earl, and Anohni, while his scores, which include 2017's award-winning Good Time and 2019's Uncut Gems, help tell the stories of those films as eloquently as his own albums explore how history, memory, and music intersect.

The son of musically inclined Russian emigrants, the young Lopatin was inspired by the synth sounds of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Stevie Wonder in his father's record collection, as well as classic video game soundtracks such as Metroid. His early forays into music included the compositions he wrote on his father's Roland Juno-60 synth as well as the Grainers, a grunge band that he and his longtime collaborator and friend Joel Ford formed in middle school. After being kicked out of the group, Lopatin devoted himself to mastering keyboards and the guitar, and he re-formed the Grainers in high school as an electric jazz combo. In college, he performed in a post-punk band and began making noise music as an archival science grad student at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute.

While playing with the trio Astronaut and working on another solo project, Infinity Window, Lopatin began working as Oneohtrix Point Never in the mid-2000s. Adapting the project's name from the Boston radio station Magic 106.7, he introduced Oneohtrix Point Never with 2007's sci-fi-tinged Betrayed in the Octagon and issued a prolific stream of releases over the next few years. These included 2009's reflective Russian Mind and the comparatively bright and accessible Zones Without People. These two albums, along with Betrayed in the Octagon and selected tracks from cassette releases, were gathered as Rifts late in 2009 by No Fun Productions. With 2010's critically acclaimed Editions Mego release Returnal, Lopatin went further afield with Oneohtrix Point Never, incorporating noise as well as more accessible melodies into the album. In 2011, he released the OPN album Replica -- which featured samples from commercials and was also his first album recorded in a professional studio. He also founded the Software label and the duo Games (later renamed Ford Lopatin) with Ford, who was also a member of Tigercity at the time.

In 2013, Lopatin released the fragmented, ambitious Oneohtrix Point Never album R Plus Seven on Warp. That year, he also collaborated with Brian Reitzell on the score to Sofia Coppola's film The Bling Ring. Over the next few years, while working on OPN projects that ranged from a soundtrack for Koji Morimoto's 1995 anime Magnetic Rose to the nu-metal-inspired album Garden of Delete, Lopatin continued to make a name for himself as a film composer. In 2015, he issued the score for Partisan, director Ariel Kleinman's film about a cult that teaches children to be assassins. Following collaborations with Anohni, DJ Earl, and FKA Twigs, Lopatin's 2017 score for Good Time, a crime thriller directed by longtime friend Josh Safdie and his brother Benny, recalled the music of John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream as well as his own early work. Featuring the Iggy Pop collaboration "The Pure and the Damned," Good Time won the Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The following year, Lopatin contributed to David Byrne's album American Utopia, which was released in March 2018. At the end of 2019, he reunited with the Safdie brothers to create the score for Uncut Gems, which used operatic vocals and electronics inspired by Vangelis and Jerry Goldsmith to convey the scope of a story about a New York City jeweler who risks everything in pursuit of a windfall. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi