i want a thread for Holly Herndon

and it's totally unlistenable!

unless you have ASMR I guess

what is amr? i found the whole album an uncompelling drag tbh

*asmr

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response

has a dedicated ilx thread - ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=40&threadid=96481

i kinda love the holly herndon ASMR track??

there are a few great moments on the rest of the album but overall idk

The heck is this ASMR track? Makes me feel irrationally embarrassed.

Which one is the ASMR track? I listened to about 2/3 of Platform on Spotify yesterday and just got a major nostalgia buzz. 2002 laptop music redux. It was pretty though. Will probably end up buying.

this is obviously doing well because they just sent out a warning to people who pre-ordered that shipping might take a while.

Worked at the shop on Saturday and listened to this 3 times. Sounds really good on a nice system -- this is probably my favorite record of the year so far. I didn't get any ASMR reactions from it, but our speakers are in the back of the store.

This album is BANANAS.

I think I might get ASMR reactions! "Lonely at the Top" made me feel... off

it's kinda terrible imo, the only track i skip on the record.

Morning Sun is so gorgeous, and achieves a weird trick of sounding both claustrophobic and cavernous at the same time. Her sound design is amazing.

Yep, but crucially it's in the service of some great tunes - I wouldn't be interested it if it was just a dry exercise in sound art. ASMR track is kinda lol mostly o_O, it was amusing for a while but I've started skipping it now.

Intro to the last track is... destabilising. Prob not a good idea to try to fall asleep to this album.

I have no idea if it's technically AMSR, but some music (especially pure vocal harmony music, with lots of reverb, certain speeds of very choppy tremolo) does regularly provoke physical sensations - kind of shivery fingers running down my shoulders/back, but not in an unpleasant way at all.

The thing is, the supposed AMSR track on this album provokes absolutely no reaction in me at all. (I, too, have started skipping it.) Morning Sun, however, has those qualities so exactly that it's actually quite distracting to listen to it on headphones at work.

This album is absolutely phenomenal. As Roz says, the sound design is astonishing, on top of it being really intriguing and compelling music.

the words on that "lonely at the top" one, with their unreserved praise, also provoke a reaction of weird, pleasurable discomfort

really digging 'morning sun' + 'locker leak' off this
obvs 'chorus' is still classic

liking this one much more than "movement" so far

I'm late to the party but this is great!

the sound palette seems pretty limited.. How many times can you use the 'atonal percussion rustle/avalanche' sample before it gets old? the quality of the percussion is nice, but the overload of pitched vocal samples gives it a disposable, later OPN-like quality. feels very 'of the late 2000s'. vocal clutter is way over the top. i could listen to quarantine by laurel halo all day, but the use of vocals on this is grating as shit. i miss chicks on speed produced by the mego guys.

"disposable" is just fine by me; i'm associating this with vaporwave

I'm hearing early '80s Laurie Anderson in her Herndon's sound

i really like the spoken track - i find it funny and kind of theatrical at the same time. it reminds me a bit of some interactive theatre things i've seen.

Any London ilxors going to the show?

how did this leave me cold at first? it suddenly CLICKED a few weeks ago and i haven't been able to stop listening

some of the gorgeous textures remind me of orchestra of bubbles!

It actually reminds me a bit of of the gentler bits of Confield, just the textural crunch of all those granular bits of micro-sound, but with heaps of sugar throughout.

confield flakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzP9IwznNuQ

Which one is the ASMR track? I listened to about 2/3 of Platform on Spotify yesterday and just got a major nostalgia buzz. 2002 laptop music redux. It was pretty though. Will probably end up buying.

― Jeff W, Tuesday, 19 May 2015 19:17 (4 months ago)

the clarity of the soundfield on this is so different to anything from that period, even the very best and best engineered of it like autechre

Some of her stuff reminds me of some Tortoise -- which, coincidentally, also has a member named Herndon.

Astonishing gig last night in London - she had a couple of other people onstage with her, a vocalist/dancer whose vocals were being chopped up into a million pieces in real time. Also a dude behind a laptop whose sole job appeared to be to type messages at the audience (best one = "FUCK THERESA MAY"). It was all clearly live (and texturally quite different from the album) but I had no idea how most of it was being done.

+1324232234545345 to any notion of seeing her live; IMO she wiped the floor with everyone else who played Big Ears last year, and the live-data-manipulation stuff was a major part of that

yeah that was an excellent gig (and jam city supporting was brilliant too, and again v different to the record)

cool talk w/DJ Rupture: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21582-lullabies-for-the-broken-brain/

did you mean to link this? https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/loop-holly-herndon-and-jace-clayton/

ha yes, wrong tab. ty.

her process breakdown is good too (haven't gotten through the whole thing yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6baj34lxF4g

Discovering Platform now. Sick, and reminds me a little of sometime ilxor Lynskey

on the cover of the latest issue of the wire.

― stirmonster, Wednesday, March 11, 2015 8:49 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was v cool imo

http://i67.tinypic.com/wb28lc.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9OjL6Mjqo

That is excellent.

and terrifying.

dream combo

Intrigued by the idea of working with AI but not really impressed by the actual track.

I have a feeling that sentiment will characterize most reactions to the seemingly inevitable onslaught of music that will “use” “AI” in the next years

new single is pretty massive

https://youtu.be/r4sROgbaeOs

huge. video is nuts in the best possible way.

reaction vids are really famous though and I don't know why. it sucks that search results now include the funny video and then a bunch of people reacting to said funny video

Um, you answered your own question, very precisely.

well I was gonna say, they're in the algo because they're popular, but then I remembered to take it one step further

I was 17 in '95 and "sampling is theft" was a rockist position. If you were into dance music you just rolled your eyes at that.

low-fi beats to study to is an entire thing that people just throw on and listen to all day. could definitely see the fake Drake stuff just being background noise in the same way. there's just so much background noise these days, and an even duller Drake-like stream is even more of that -- you're not even going to think "wow, I love this and I've got to turn it up!"

just a low and steady hum in the background, where you figure out which type of hum you want

like how they pipe in white noise to office buildings because its too uncomfortably quiet otherwise, but for music

the future and utility of AI-generated music tools isn't copycat songs made from whole algorithmic cloth; it's having tools that let you "make the drums more like (this)" or "come up with a chord progression like (this)," or just cleaning up audio - like "magic wand" photo editing tools - without requiring the time or technical knowledge to make the changes yourself.

it seems transparently obvious to me that when there are better tools like this, there will be artists who make cool stuff with it

that’s definitely the upside!

I didn’t mean to sound too doomerish, but passive music consumption has shifted from the radio to streaming and there’s going to continue to be a break between commodity work and musicians doing mindful creative work. I just don’t especially like the current shape of things

I agree with that, I have wondered if we're at least gonna reach the end of lo-fi or "bedroom" recordings, seems like we may soon just have a plugin that makes your recordings sound somewhat like polished studio recordings

low-fi beats to study to is an entire thing that people just throw on and listen to all day.

imo this feels like a different thing than how music is usually listened to by anyone who's set foot in a record store but yeah I have wondered if there's gonna be a large chunk of people who only want to engage with music in that way. maybe they're the people who just "don't really like music" normally though

music serves many functions, and there's already a massive industry that exists to serve an audience that craves auditory astroturf

if it's a handful of corporations which start meeting that need, with fewer employees than the music industry currently supports, that's going to be bad for (a) musicians' ability to earn $ from a "day job" and (b) emerging artists who use those jobs to get their chops; but it doesn't seem particularly world-changing in terms of the impacts on art or audience.

I mean, during the peak album sales period (almost all CDs) in the late 90s, the number of people buying a lot of music was really low. The average American bought something like 1 - 2 albums a year, iirc!
The rest of us were offsetting that stat

You'll be able to press a button and get a generically hi-fi studio mix from AI, sure, but you can already press a button and get a lo-fi, tape saturated, wobbly one. Choose your aesthetic.

one thing I've heard a lot was that AI was gonna start writing the background music for grocery stores and restaurants which I always thought misunderstands what that music is for. there's all sorts of designed BGM that's cheap or royalty free to set whatever mood you want. they want people to recognize what it is! I think if you had fake versions of Janet Jackson's "Runaway" or whatever it would just freak everyone out