“Now that experimental music is in the club, what does that mean politically?” Holly Herndon asks herself. “Will we just hear weird sounds and then get drunk and dance, or are we now able to discuss the values that experimental music can conjure up in those scenarios as well?” It’s a heady line of inquiry, but the California-based artist is particularly well-suited for it.
Herndon has a long history in club culture, both as a participant and a performer; she has also done postgraduate work in electronic music at Mills College, and she is currently a doctoral candidate at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. It was there that John Chowning came up with the algorithm for FM synthesis in the '60s, paving the way for synthesizers like Yamaha's DX7 and revolutionizing the music industry by making those advancements available far beyond the limits of pricey analog hardware. Herndon's music has a similarly democratizing intent.
To begin with, she takes technology, including the Internet, as a starting point rather than a stumbling block. Where some would discount online culture as a distraction—or, worse, false consciousness—for Herndon, it's just a place we all call home. As such, it works its way directly into her music, both as subject and content. Featured on her forthcoming album Platform, the uneasy single "Home", which she calls "a love song for prying eyes," is dedicated to the NSA; "Chorus", meanwhile, utilizes a software program that eavesdrops on her browser and folds its audio into a shuddering percussive thrum.
Formally, Herndon's music reflects multiple aspects of her upbringing, with whipcracking electro rhythms underpinning complicated choral harmonies and head-spinning bursts of white noise, the provenance of which often defies easy understanding. (One song on the new album derives from the multichannel body recordings of a contact-miked modern dance performance; elsewhere, Herndon whipped a microphone like the tail rotor of a helicopter to create a wild wah-wah effect.) "I'm kind of allergic to the idea of something being more serious than something else," she admits.
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With Platform, she attempts to use electronic music to ask deeper questions about politics, community, and communication. The album's title, borrowed from the theorist and designer Benedict Singleton, refers not to technological environments as much as the attempt to mount a collective effort to define our own future.
"There are a lot of false narratives that happen in music," she says, "and a lot of that [positions] the artist as this single, solo icon. But in order to make interesting and great work, there's a whole team of people. I’m really serious about not presenting myself as this lone auteur, and part of the hope for Platform is that we might all be able to acknowledge each other without somehow breaking an illusion or taking away from the work of individuals."
When we speak via Skype in late March, she reels off a list of names of the contributors, collaborators, and influences behind the album: Metahaven, the Dutch design studio that created videos for "Interference" and "Home"; Suhail Malik, the critical theorist whose concept of a transformative exit, rather than mere escape, inspired the song "An Exit"; Berlin-based producers Amnesia Scanner; vocalists Colin Self, Amanda DeBoer, and Stef Caers; her partner, Mat Dryhurst, who contributed ideas and code to many tracks; and the artist Spencer Longo (aka @chinesewifi), who added "word sculptures" to a disorienting track called "Locker Leak", which applies crackling electronic processing to beatific choral passages and tongue-twisting spoken-word phrases ("Who lasts? Glass lasts. Who lasts longest? Grass lasts longest").
For all the album's high-concept ideas, though, it's also frequently flat-out gorgeous, suffused in gossamer choral melodies reminiscent of Arvo Pärt. "I'm an American from the South, so I can't help my optimism," says the Tennessee native. "I try not to be blindly optimistic, but I do feel hopeful. The ideas around Platform are so much about coming together with people whose work that I really respect and love. Instead of being like, ‘Ugh, everything sucks, let me just escape into myself,’ it's like, ‘How can we support each other instead of ignoring or tearing each other down?’ Let's figure out how we would like things to be together.”
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Pitchfork: The twin poles of your work seem to be technology and the human voice. Was it a conscious decision to make vocals so central to your music?
Holly Herndon: That just goes back to the beginning. As a kid, I was in all kinds of choirs, and that was what I was most comfortable with. So when I was developing my sound at Mills and trying to find the fleshy side of technology, the voice seemed like a really approachable point for that.
In terms of performance, when you have a laptop, one criticism has been that the audience doesn't understand what you're doing and can't really empathize. But when you interject a voice, people can automatically relate to that. And at this point, for me, performance and music is about communication. I was deeply involved in noise scenes for a while, and a lot of that felt like, “How can I put up this huge barrier between what I'm doing and the audience?” and sometimes that can be effective. But I'm actually interested in creating entry points for people, so then I can introduce more abrasive or out-there ideas, and the voice is the most effective way I can do that.
Pitchfork: The song "Lonely at the Top" features lots of small clicking sounds and the whispering voice of Claire Tolan, who is known for her work with a phenomenon called autonomous sensory meridian response—can you walk me through the concept there?
HH: ASMR is a tingling sensation some people get that's caused by really mundane or domestic personal sounds, like opening a package or tapping on an iPhone. They have these samplers online that will run you through all the different kinds of ASMR to see what you're sensitive to. I actually have physical responses, especially for acrylic nails on smart phones—it's really weird. When I hear that I'm like, [blissful sigh].
So what got me into ASMR was how these hyper-domestic sounds that people are sharing over the Internet are physically impacting and touching strangers. I find that really beautiful. Often people say, “The Internet is separating us all and there's no real friendships anymore.” But ASMR shows that the Internet can actually help soothe people.
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Pitchfork: A few songs on the album, like "Unequal" and "New Ways to Love", sound almost like liturgical music.
HH: That makes total sense, because my dad's a preacher and I started playing guitar and making music in the church. I have a hard time talking about it because it’s a very personal thing for me, but despite the fact that it is no longer part of my belief system, I keep coming back to aesthetics of communion and the optimism and power of choral music. But in a way, I'm most interested in using this power as motivation towards new modes of collectivity—which perhaps describes why trance music, which has such an ecstatic power to it, played such a role in this record. It is this anomalous universal sound of protest and collectivity.
Pitchfork: You recently taught a class at Stanford, what was that like?
HH: Up until now I was a teacher's assistant, but for this class I actually developed the curriculum with a fellow student and musicologist. The title of the class was Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 1980 to Today—it's kind of a mouthful. CCRMA [Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics] is this amazing nerd castle on the hill, full of smart, interesting people; for such a rigorous place, it has such a nice feeling to it. People are really open and no one is snotty at all.
But one thing I noticed is they didn't have a class on aesthetics; they didn't have anything where they were discussing work after 1980. A lot of academic programs kind of stop in the '70s. There's this golden period for electronic music—everybody wants to cover Stockhausen, but then they kind of stop there. We really wanted to talk about music that students were listening to when they're not in class and give them the tools to be able to analyze that and see where those sounds were coming from. The student body there is so awake and hungry. It was just really fun to listen to and talk about music with them and learn from them.
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Pitchfork: You have said that you took up the contrabass when you were studying at Mills. Do you still play?
HH: Oh God no. [laughs] I was terrible. That was a mistake.
Pitchfork: You must have learned something from it, though.
HH: I learned that I hated playing the contrabass—and that I didn't have to do that in order to be a serious musician/composer.