Holly Herndon - Proto

May 10, 2019 - 4AD

Many people think an artist’s job is to capture what we call beauty and bottle it up for others to consume. But what they don’t realize is the urge to capture the beautiful eventually leads to the question: what is beauty, anyway? Which eventually leads to the question: who am I to call something “beautiful”? And: who am I to record it? 

All humans have a drive to create, but most of us contain this drive in some sort of societal justification. A greater good or purpose, like designing products to sell to others, for example, or designing technology to advance human exploration of the universe. A personal creative practice, though, is an open-ended series of questions. It’s divergent and reflective in nature. It requires you to express a thought, then objectively see the record of that thought, objectively seeing yourself being something, and then to build out from it. Armed with context and experience, you are using yourself as a tool to explore the world around you, by yourself, generally with no clear destination. The artwork itself is a residue of the act. 

Holly Herndon is not for the faint of heart. She is relentlessly inquisitive, and her work leaves you with more questions than you arrived with. Her speculative musical style and vast combination of influences are at once music and sound art, feeling along the edges of a musical frontier. In her third full-length album Proto, she explores the fundamental, universal power of the human voice as our first means of communication and our first instrument by using an ensemble of vocalists and an A.I. she developed named Spawn. Through a gel of classic thematic Sci-Fi, a quick first impression forms that the tracks are about an other entity learning how to be a human. But, as the album concludes, we come to realize we’ve learned something too. We crave connection in a disconnected world. 

What is it like feeling alien in terrestrial form? What is it like to simultaneously be and have an awareness of being? Armed with an arsenal of modern musical context and fearlessly experimental, Herdon pulls expressive modes from spiritual hymns, trance, classical choral music, gothic early ‘00s pop anthems, Bjork, and nature to compose a soundscape that explores these existential questions with a fragile, innocent optimism. She and Spawn cut up vocals, distort them and paste them back together, weaving them in and out of each other to build ethereal textures. She exploits our familiarity with musical patterns to hold us suspended in place. But the most powerful thing she’s accomplished on this album is tapping into the roots at the bottom of our collective musical consciousness. 

Humans have been singing together since the first human heard a sound, decided it was pleasing, mimicked it and invented what we now call music. A chorus is a universal device that crosses cultural and temporal boundaries. We use it to pass our histories down from one generation to another, to entertain, to comfort ourselves in crisis, to rally ourselves for battle, to express complex emotional responses, to feel connected. The human voice is a sound we find rich with life force. And the chorus in Proto is used like the chorus in a Classical play—an omniscient narrator essential to the scene and to the story, guiding us through the emotional space, interacting with itself, and heightening the drama moment-by-moment. The lyrics themselves are generally secondary to the textures the words create in the tracks. The words blur together seamlessly, and recognizable meaning only reveals itself intermittently with high intensity, such as the striking lamentation, “Why am I so lost?” refrained by every voice singing the song ‘Crawler.’ These moments of recognition are only made more potent hearing them through Spawn’s perspective, which heightens the empathy. 

Two songs on the album are listed as “live trainings”—‘Canaan’ and ‘Evening Shades.’ These are sessions Herndon hosted to train Spawn how to interact with song. Unlike many of the other tracks, Herndon leaves these trainings relatively raw, only lightly touched post-production. They employ call-and-response, an age-old device of folk singing used to teach, communicate and connect. The voices oscillate between harmony and unison, and we are privileged to hear how they begin to read and react to each other instantaneously, a mutual understanding between human and machine. 

As a body of work, PROTO is a triumph. By tailoring itself to our empathy, its story tricks us into remembering the things we spend so much time trying to forget about our existence. ☔