Holly Herndon’s work thrives on the tension between abstraction and accessibility. Large chunks of her full-length debut, Movement, reflected the Mills College graduate’s grounding in academia. Early on, electronic music was mostly the product of state-funded institutions like universities and public radio due to the vast resources needed to acquire and maintain the equipment. The people who had access to the machines in the 1950s and 60s were artists, theorists, and technicians, and not always in that order. Coming out of the world of 20th century classical music, which had happily abandoned the possibility of mass appeal, artists like John Cage and Milton Babbitt pursued electronic music with an exploratory zeal that often abandoned ideas conventional musicality.
320 kbps | 31 MB | UL | MC ** FLAC
That electronic music from the academic world can often be described as dry and clinical is not a sleight—the pleasures are there, they just happen to be more cerebral. About half of the excellent Movement (“Breathe”, “Dilato”) worked this side of the room. But then there were tracks like “Fade” and the title track, which applied Hendon’s brilliant textural ear and vocal manipulations to a context where rhythm and melody were equally important.
Chorus, Herndon’s new two-song EP, essentially amplifies the extremes of her musical personality and pushes the tension almost to the breaking point. The title track already has the feel of minor landmark, as she chops and processes her voice into disorienting shapes while retaining its human core. In terms of her basic palette, she’s operating in a terrain not too far from Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest, R Plus Seven; “Chorus” has some of the cool, clean, and disconcertingly empty cast of an early computer’s 8-bit soundbank, and the fragments of her vocal evoke hand-keyed early sampling, where you’d play the shifted pitches on a keyboard. Using these vaguely retro tools, she’s crafted a sleek futuristic pop song with an experimental bent that is ultimately deeply emotional.
The B-side, “Solo Voice”, comes from a different place. It takes tiny shards of syllables and sets them ping-ponging between the speakers; as was often true on Movement, the massive amount of space means you sometimes wonder if the piece has ended only to have more notes emerge from the silence. It comes over like an art object as much as a piece of music, and it has its own kind of steely beauty despite its vastly more abstracted feel. The basic elements of “Chorus” and “Solo Voice” have much in common, but the difference in how they work is significant, which speaks to Herndon’s expansive range as a composer. As two sides of her aesthetic are pushed to new heights on this 12″, the possibilities of her future music seem vast indeed.