At the beginning and in the middle of the 90s, the slowly creeping digitalization started to reverse the way we used to see the world. There was a new and mysterious order, and even though everything seemed more complex, things were much more transparent and easier to reach. Soon, IDM needed glitch, in order to allow us to experience this sudden alienation and to crash silly illusions. Like a huge crack, glitch ran through the new, digitally glimmering surface. Now that our idea of the web has advanced and the digitalization has reached every corner of our lives, things are starting to look different again. The (seemingly) coherent narrative has made room for a polyphony of individual stories in social networks. Instead of merely canalizing these stories, as it’s done by mems like Chillwave, Seapunk or the meta-level-platform Vaporwave, Holly Herndon is inflating them, making all the filter bubbles burst on her second record »Platform«. And even though her popularity started with the strong and well exposed physicality of her performances (Herndon sees the computer as an instrument and herself as a musician rather than a producer), the structure of her music has developed into a coherent concept. These new ideas were mostly teasered by the videos of »Chorus« and »Home«, both of which are compressing malicious and oppressing scenes of our thoroughly digitalized lives. Herdon’s music has become just as compressed: Its foundation sounds like IDM, and still, her music isn’t alien due to glitch but due to her vocals. Her voice is Herndon’s main instrument. Sometimes, it is wandering from clear melodies through the madness of her tracks, peppered with polyphonic and poignant pieces of trance; at other times, it is cut into individual syllables in order to be rebuilt, forming erratic rhythmic elements. The uncanny highlight of this digital-hauntological record consists of a single speech-sample, untreated and naked: On »Lonely At The Top«, performance artist Claire Tolan is purring confessions of love into the mic, exaggerating the promises of social networks about positivism and individualization. What used to be glitch to IDM is humankind to Herndon’s music. It’s a conceptual and musical master piece, and there might not be another record as elaborated and spooky in 2015.
Platform
