i want a thread for Holly Herndon

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.

I don't like the songwriting at all but that's a cool timbre she's hit upon there.

^^^^this is my opinion of every holly herndon song ever p much

*hides in Rockist Corner with pomenitul and other sticks-in-the-mud who still believe in old-fashioned nonsense like songwriting while the A E S T H E T I C crowd storm the cultural pantheon*

I'm a shameless aesthete but to these ears it comes off as an interminable string of platitudinous highs.

we're all aesthetes - there's a whole specific thing. you have to space the capitals

I thought that was a vapourware meme, though – does HH qualify? I must know!

*wave, sorry.

It sounds amazing. It doesn't exactly make me want to listen to it again or use it in a dj set (although maybe for the right moment?), but still. It's just vocals, drums, and stabs, right?

Sounds like something Kanye will probably sample this year.

awesome
a welcome return

Save me I'm trending

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) March 11, 2019

(Theresa May saved her after an hour or so by jumping on a plane to Strasbourg)

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