Holly Herndon - Movement (Rvng Intl., 2012)
Finding the right balance. For now, Holly Herndon is getting help from her music professors at Stanford University. But will soon be adding a PhD to her name. For a while she also added the letters dj, but that was a holdover from a few months in Berlin. She has since turned her back on the city, with everything she learned there nailed to the back of her mind. The vibrant nightlife of the German capital impressed her, and she tries to translate that into ‘Movement’ when her academic title doesn’t get in the way. Holly Herndon has a strong human-machine relationship. A laptop is her most intimate device. Her music is deliberately cool.
It studies the possible and stretches everything to the impossible. It is the starting point for the closing track ‘Dilato’, for which she has bent Bruce Rameker’s baritone into inhuman sounds. It sounds like an academic exercise, but one that sticks and has to be endured. Like the white noise of the opener ‘Terminal’, where she leans towards the soundscapes of Ben Frost, only to leave the logical path completely after the effervescent ‘Fade’ and discover the machine in man. ‘Breathe’, as the title suggests, is an asthmatic emergency sigh in which breaths and sighs are narrowly held with an unexpectedly interjected and shrill chord. It is pure abstraction and dehumanisation of the voice and her person. She repeats the exercise on ‘Control And’. But the track finishes before it was even perceived. The voice attracts her, but her manipulations repel her. Consciously, and just as well. ‘Movement’ is carried by a repetitive trance line, then throws in a techno beat and hesitates whether it wants to gag you or make you dance. Holly Herndon loses your attention in her short interludes. Little electronic tasters that evoke the discomfort of the very first raster-noton records, but fused with a hint of techno. Like Laurel Halo, she refuses to gravitate towards simplicity and ease. ‘Movement’ - the album - is an exhausting listening trip that sometimes makes you scream with boredom and then murmurs. Elusive yet haunting.
Released on Rvng Intl.,