Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never: “Sleep Dealer” So a Folgers TV spot turns into something playful and strange on “Sleep Dealer,” a song that answers the question, “What if a jingle’s ghost became sentient and started listening to a lot of Thelonius Monk?” By spinning the white noise of commerce into abstraction, Replica pulls off something of a meta-ambient coup. The album is sourced from samples of old commercials, cut, looped, and doused with effects. This idea churns through Replica, an exercise in science-fiction nostalgia by Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, a man who's never shied away from conceptual electronic experimentation.
In this way, advertising might be the most pervasive ambient art form of our time. But they’re still there, making a soft impression. Though these blasts of capitalism aim to stun, they often recede into the ether.
Or the billboards you walk by every day that don’t make it past your peripheral, and the TV ads that soundtrack nothing but your Twitter scrolling. Like the banner ad on your favorite website that you’ve seen a hundred times but never really registered, never mind clicked. As good as advertisements are at getting our attention, we are often even better at ignoring them.
