Holly Herndon’s music is cinematic, but not in the Lynchian or bombastic way that the word is usually employed to denote. It has the stuttering energy of stop-motion footage built from thousands of photographs: synth figures jerk into sight then skitter off, bass notes stun like the flash of a camera, rhythms surprise as they speed and slow. It’s typical of this San Francisco-based composer’s dexterity with juxtaposition that the actual film projected across the back of the stage conveys other rhythms entirely, its swirling images more giddy than propulsive.
Performed at a bank of laptops, Herndon’s music could come across as alien and denatured, were it not for her fascination with bodies and organic matter. Her mouth is almost constantly at a microphone, producing murmurs, gasps and clicks; the more she dislocates the sound from the movement of her lips, processes and warps it, the more mesmerising those movements become. Prominent in the sound range are the ominous whip of helicopter rotor blades, metallic glitches and the shattering of glass; prominent in the backdrop imagery are microscopic closeups of corn on the cob and iceberg lettuce. This is a woman with a deft sense of humour.
Mixing tracks from her 2012 album Movement with this year’s follow-up, Platform, Herndon’s set rarely gives away the sources of her music (many related to the mechanics of computer use) but consistently conveys its human quality. Her face dances with expression as she prods and caresses an electronic touchpad, coaxing notes to fizz and shimmer and fall like raindrops. The sounds are too restless to convey anything as conventional as a narrative, but stories are present nonetheless, in the sequence of “questions and confessions” and other text up on the projection screen. In the last, Herndon speaks for the first time: “Thx ppl :)” it reads.
