You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

Daniel Lopatin has been making experimental electronic music as one-o-tricks point never since 2007.

In this episode, he takes apart the song Sticky Drama from his 2015 album Garden of Delete.

Coming up, he'll break down how he created artificial voices using software for the vocals, and how he sees his songs as pieces of science fiction.

My name is Rishikesh Herway. You're listening to Song Exploder.

This is Daniel Lopatin, aka one-o-tricks point never. I wanted to conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions, and also sugary texture.

And create a psychoscribble like the way a little kid will psychotically draw on his notebook, and it just has this live wire vibe to it.

I got inspired by the music that he's playing.

It's just a software synthesizer. The main progression.

It was a preset that we tweaked in serum.

And it was a preset that we tweaked in serum.

And it was a preset that we tweaked in serum.

And it was a preset that we tweaked in serum.

And the sound tells you how to play it in a way. That's what I like about presets as they kind of beg to be played some way, and you have to decode them.

The obvious way to use that preset was to play it on the higher octaves and do a kind of like a hardstyle EDM beat.

Like what? What's a good example?

I don't know. It all just goes, it's just like, it's just a...

It's just heinous. And so let's find some other meaning for this. We find some other way to deal with this.

The lead vocals.

It's a software synthesizer called Chip Speech. I like this sort of saccharin, cartoony, ridiculous voice.

The aspect of it that's nice is that I can input the lyrics and then play them chromatically.

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