Holly Herndon’s songs play new tricks on you with each listen. The Bay Area composer and singer’s work percolates in the mind first, unlike the elemental club music that informs its sprightly tempos and ebbing bass. But though Herndon’s music is at its core "cerebral"—all surface details and richly layered textures—it still exhibits warmth and emotion. Herndon’s ambitious vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet.
Herndon constructs synth patches from the sound of her voice, whether she’s murmuring, singing tunefully, or on the verge of shrieking. But she also processes and sequences acoustic sounds derived from movement and disorder (what could be shattering glass, a bucket being poured out, the tapping of a keyboard, the swish of a dancer’s legs), molding samples until they no longer reference the action that produced them. Even with the processing, her tracks retain an organic quality, something fleshy that suggests a given sound once existed in space.
Into these complicated soundworlds—all of which are rooted in human action—Herndon mixes noises that emanate from the structure of her computer (hums, fan whirs, "thinking" noises), as well as its internal audio (she records the sound of her Internet activity and uses it as a source material or a point of inspiration). For her, a laptop is a natural extension of her mind and body rather than a place of escape and self-negation. Platform is animated by a constant conversation between these two elements: the embodied vocalist (usually Herndon) and the digital ghosts in the machine.
In interviews, music videos, or on her blog, Herndon spells out her themes and methods. She seems to consider her art as, by design, didactic: In its form and process, it emulates a utopian societal model, one for the next phase of the technological age. Her music offers a vision of a time in which our digital accoutrements might become places for self-expression and improvement, and our relationship with them is less fraught. Herndon doesn’t believe that her work exists in a vacuum; it signifies in all directions, and is tied to and defined by everything around it. By explaining her music, she seeks to set up a more direct relationship with her audience. Clarifying the experiment is, to some extent, part of the whole project.
There’s always the danger that channeling our listening according to an artist’s directives means we’ll miss out on engaging with the music in more personally significant ways. But though Herndon unifies her pieces with clear conceptual frameworks, the moment-to-moment experience stokes our subjective impressions. The best of Herndon’s compositions function something like the age-old visual illusion of the young woman with the big hat, who could just as easily be, on second look, a babushka-wearing grandmother. You might focus on the cold digital debris or the human voice crying out one minute and a melody or a meaningful lyric the next. At transcendent moments—busier, murkier work like "Interference" or "Home"—Herndon offers an unclassifiable combination of the two.
The previously released single "Chorus" provides the album's sonic template. It builds and settles expertly, as if catered toward the energy of a dancefloor in real time, and packs an earwormy wordless chorus. But it breaks through the wall of techno-informed percussion and synth pulsations only sporadically, like a lament filtered through a bad cell connection, or a Fever Ray melody submitted to John Cage-like randomized subtractive processes. Transitional notes fall out like baby teeth and at points the whole thing breaks down into digital chaos—here, Herndon’s Internet chatter is like a primordial ooze the song emerges out of and back into.
Those who loved the pop acuity of "Chorus" won’t find much else on Platform as persuasive in that vein. In fact, the record’s only weak moments come when Herndon adopts pop song structures instead of self-generated ones. "Morning Sun", in particular, is based around low, unembellished melody which doesn’t develop anywhere in particular, accompanied by tittering, Dan Deacon-like arpeggios of vocal phonemes. To liven things up, Herndon lays on threatening sheets of noise atop the mix, but they seem unrelated to the action going on underneath.
The most effective tracks offer something more open and spacious. "Unequal" highlights Herndon’s distinctive sense of harmony, which often has a haunting, irresolute quality recalling Baroque church music or plainchant. "DAO" also highlights her operatic vocalizations, but this time, they play a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with unstable, rough-hewn percussion patches built from everyday sounds (the approach strongly recalls Matthew Herbert’s work sampling household sounds to create elaborate virtual instruments, or Matmos’ surgery-noise drum circles).
Platform’s most unusual track sets aside Herndon's usual generative techniques. "Lonely at the Top" is designed to induce ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), a scientifically unexplained process in which exposure to certain sounds induce a tingling sensation on the necks and scalps of the susceptible. Herndon and her collaborator, ASMR sound artist Claire Tolan, adopt the general M.O. of the vibrant and extensive ASMR YouTube community, which is home to endless webcam videos featuring gentle, stylized whispering and tapping sounds. Behind Tolan’s comforting voice, Herndon contributes small, intimate sounds: extremely closely miked and subtly processed, they give the track—an ode to one online enclave that has succeeded in accessing the corporeal in a virtual environment—an otherworldly quality.
It's hard to craft avant-garde music that feels truly new; inevitably, new languages correct and build off of the old ones, and create accidental resonances with others. Holly Herndon, by her own account, still believes in a music of "now." She eschews the free-associative, playful juxtapositions of fully synthetic sounds preferred by computer-music peers like PC Music's A. G. Cook, Oneohtrix Point Never, and James Ferraro, and insists on building her sound palette from the ground up, or more accurately, outwards from herself. Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year. It doesn’t present a solid, replicable blueprint for the future of laptop composition and performance practice, but comes over more like beta of an app, with a lot of room for further development and expansion.
