Holly Herndon Is The Future

“Let’s see if I can clear myself up a bit here,” says Holly Herndon. She’s crouched over a computer and dials, fiddling: her distorted, crystalline voice fades from an electronic glissando to her natural American accent. We’re thirty minutes into her Sydney Festival set, and we hear her speak without effect for the first time.

Well, kind of. Herndon, experimental sound artist, composer and ASMR-explorer (long before it was bastardised by YouTubers), would probably object, as she works against ideas of ‘natural vs. unnatural’.

Her most recent album, PROTO, is in part a collaboration with Spawn, an AI created for the record. Spawn processes, then riffs, off the audio she hears. On songs like ‘Canaan (Live Training)’, you hear Spawn repeat back refrains of choral singers. Pitchfork describes it like “hearing a child in speech therapy”, and its far-reaching themes of apocalyptic threats and human connection serve as a backdrop to this strange, tender child-rearing.

But small children don’t make the best travel companions, and Herndon, based in Berlin, tells the audience she’s left Spawn at home, though her voice comes through throughout the set. Still, Spawn is just one of a chorus, both on PROTO and on-stage, where Herndon is joined by four others.

Visualiser Mat Dryhurst hides in the back, timing these uncanny valley landscapes of forests and fallen kingdoms to the music. On the small pop-up Spiegeltent stage at Sydney Festival, Herndon and her chorus of three — Albertine Sarges, Colin Self and Evelyn Saylor — carefully move around as they sing in a discordant beauty.

Chopped and fragmented by Herndon live, it takes time to hear the unity being created, even for someone very familiar with her songs. The voices seem to meet somewhere in the air in-between each performer — you almost have to re-train your ears to avoid a wall of sound, and hear the nuances within the noise.

All four are sublime singers, and Herndon is rarely centred as a ‘performer’. She’s equal to the chorus on-stage, with each singer having not necessarily ‘solos’, but moments to guide the songs, whether through a cappella conducting or taking the most decipherable vocals.

Even when at their most chopped and distorted, their voices recall early choral music: ‘Frontier’, probably one of the most straight-forward songs of PROTO, is inspired by Appalachian Sacred Harp singing, with Spawn taking things to another, higher level.

The idea’s only furthered  by their largely all-white, vaguely ecclesiastic outfits, with Saylor wearing a kind of pious milk-maid smock and bandana, while Self’s mesh shirt and draping coat recalled the communion of a club.

It’s a meeting of many eras and influences, yet the distinct, near-religious beauty of their harmonising ensures Herndon’s show, even at its most experimental or ‘unnatural’, always centres human expression, whether that be ecstacy or emptiness.

For Herndon, AI isn’t an evil enemy against that expression, but a chance to extend it. Late last year, she got in a well-reported conversation with Grimes online, after the latter claimed AI will “master” music and art beyond human ability. Herndon doesn’t view tech as a destructive force upon creativity but a tool to extend our abilities and form, and argued that AI can never re-create the innate humanity within creation — that art cannot be ‘mastered’ as it is ever subjective, never supreme.

The distinct, near-religious beauty of their harmonising ensures Herndon’s show, even at its most experimental or ‘unnatural’, always centres human expression.

Grimes’ understanding of AI is under a need to conquer (something complicated by her relationship to technocrat Elon Musk); Herndon, on the other hand, isn’t interested in hierarchies. Her music is mutative, reactive to the pulses of its collaborators — even if those comes from an AI.

That’s clear on-stage, with each performer doing their own ‘thing’, moving freely and without form. At one stage, Self takes to the front of the stage with Herndon crouched over her laptop, mixing his a capella in and out of a feedback loop. She swoops in dramatically with each loop, smiling to herself — the process is playful, like a child pressing buttons, ready to keep seeing things a new.

At one stage, Self leads the crowd through a call-and-response of ‘Evening Shades’, a song Spawn learns on PROTO. Herndon is recording to feed back Sydney to Spawn — while the Spiegeltent’s crowd resembles a club more than a Sunday service, we sound really, really good. Everyone gives it their all for Spawn, eager to hear to where it grows.

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Holly Herndon’s Proto is out now, and will play Mona Foma and Melbourne on January 18 and 21 respectively.

Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney. Find him on Twitter.