- Almost four years ago to the day, Holly Herndon released her last full-length album, Platform, the most high-profile record the artist has released to date. With its ground-breaking, stereo speaker-leaping production, Herndon navigated the listener through deconstructed dance music and disquieting sound collages.
In the subsequent years, she has been experimenting with an Artificial Intelligence named Spawn in an attempt to “humanise” technology. The results arrive in the form of her new album Proto, created by “training” Spawn to respond to human choral arrangements and melodies. Commenting on the album, Herndon said “Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I want an AI to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty”.
The album even features recordings of Spawn’s training, as the AI responds to human voices in the tracks Canaan and Evening Shades. The former track sounds a little bit like the soundtrack to Ghost In The Shell with its echoing shards of vocals, while the latter is more demonstrative of the training process, as Spawn responds to the choir with raw, glitchy interpretations of their harmonies.
So, as you’d expect, Proto is another fearlessly experimental record from Herndon that manages to sound both more incomplete and more accessible than its predecessor. Compared to the fully-formed compositions on previous album Platform, Proto features more of what sounds like “musical sketches”, including the cut-up vocal experiment Godmother. Yet by the same token, the record never gets quite as unsettling or atonal as Platform. The new album’s pop songs are still otherworldly, but are also the most accessible music Herndon has ever made.
Those Ghost In The Shell-esque choral parts return in the superb single Eternal, with its stuttering yet danceable beats and synthetic horn stabs. Also, there’s a gothic grandeur to the surreal electro-gospel of Frontier, while there’s something truly stadium-sized about the buzzing widescreen synth-pop of Alienation. The main reason why Proto ultimately works is because it captures the best of both worlds, showcasing Herndon at her weirdest AND catchiest.
- Matt Thrower.