‘I was with André 3000 once,’ he told me. ‘It was on a James Blake session, it wasn’t for my own stuff, but the day had nothing to do with recording anyway. We were just sitting there, speaking to each other about music and life. As we talked, there were these loops we’d made playing incessantly in the studio, over and over. Eventually I got to watch this poet write his verse to them. I experienced the same thing with Ishmael Butler.* It took both of them an enormous amount of time but also … it was a day. A day for André and a day for Ishmael. But they were both sitting there, trying to work on what was going on with me. They were trying to document what was going on with me as a producer and as a person and it was just so present. It was the closest thing I’ve seen to a painter painting something from scratch, and that really messed with my head because I don’t work like that. I don’t do anything like that. After seeing them do their thing in that way, I think I slowly began to change. Now, when I’m the one coming into a studio, I try to channel André and Ishmael and gauge what the person is about; to see whether we should even be there at all. If nothing happens then nothing happens but it’s a day, no more than that. It’s work, because you’re not just hanging out, but it’s completely inter-personal.’ Indeed many of Lopatin’s collaborators attest to the deep sensitivity of his music; like Nicolás Jaar, challenging the notion that electronic music is somehow more calculated or less emotionally driven. ‘One of the greatest parts of collaborating with Dan is that like myself, he sees work as a deep communication between two people,’ Josh Safdie told me. ‘A lot of my fondest memories of producing the two scores we’ve done together come from the middle of the night when we decide to pull up a YouTube video and decide to score that instead.