Saturday, July 4th 2015 // 20:30 // Auditorium S. Domenico
Live

Holly Herndon’s second album Platform proposes new fantasies and rejuvenates old optimism. Herndon has become a leading light in contemporary music by experimenting within the outer reaches of dance music and pop songwriting possibilities. A galvanising statement, Platform signals Herndon’s transformation as an electronic musician to a singular voice. Born in Tennessee, but reared on music abroad, Herndon broke out from her formative years in Berlin’s minimal techno scene to repatriate to San Francisco, where she currently lives and studies as a doctoral candidate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). To achieve Platform, Herndon has opened up her process to vital artists and thinkers from her creative circle, leading by example to tackle a host of topics ranging from systemic inequality, surveillance states and neo-feudalism. Herndon’s debut album Movement, released in 2012, showcased Herndon’s fascination with trance and the disjunctive sampling techniques pioneered by avant-garde composition. Subsequent singles ‘Chorus’ and ‘Home’ humanised the laptop by celebrating its capacity for memory-storage and lamenting its vulnerability in light of revelations of mass surveillance. Opposing the dystopic potential of a surveillance state and the specter of a monoculture, Platform seizes this unstable moment for a conscious shift in the pop and dance music conversation. Offering what Herndon describes as “a rupture, a paradisic gesture,” Platform is an optimistic breakthrough for Herndon, an appeal for progress, and a step toward new ways to love.