- "I just want her to beam me up to wherever she came from," a friend hollered over the whistles and applause as a smiling Holly Herndon waved thank you to the audience, closed her laptop and descended from the stage. The producer, singer and conceptual artist recently topped the bill at The Wick in Brooklyn as part of Pitchfork's ongoing Tinnitus Music Series, an event set up to showcase "composers of extreme sound." Now touring in the wake of her second album, her live show is part concert and part multimedia performance art, which is no surprise given the heady theoretical underpinnings of that record.
She shared the stage with Mat Dyhurst and Brian Rogers, who were seated at the back staring into their laptops, sending images, camera feeds and text onto the projector behind her. Before the music began, they opened a TextEdit document and typed a message asking audience members to send in questions or commentary via text message. As the messages came in, they offered cheeky, semi-philosophical responses until the whooshing sound of helicopter rotors signalled the beginning of Herndon's set. They would switch between chaotic, video game-style visuals and their TextEdit screen a number of times throughout the evening, keeping the audience giggling with pithy quips about technology and the meaning of life.
Herndon opened with Platform's lead track, "Interference," and the bass pressure was thick enough to wrap its away around your throat. Throughout her set, she unleashed sub-bass tones so startling they would make Mala blush. The only other times I have experienced that kind of low-end was seeing notoriously heavy acts like The Bug or Japanese drone metal band Boris. Rarely looking up from her laptop, Herndon sang into a chain of vocal processors over a number of cuts from the recent LP, as the cacophony of buzzing, hissing, and clicking built steadily and began to swarm around the audience.
Meanwhile, the visual component never failed to entertain. Many producers sell their live shows as audio/visual experiences, but few manage to create the kind of cross-media dialogue that Herndon's achieved. Throughout much of her set, the projector showed her navigating (in first person) a number of 3D environments designed by interactive video artist Akihiko Taniguchi. She used the software to fly through worlds filled with swarms of floating objects that duplicated until they took up the entire screen: two-dimensional human cutouts, smart devices, audio mixers, display monitors and hamburger ingredients, to name a few. Her own crowded music mirrored the maximalist scenes pictured behind her, at times reaching a fever pitch of chaotic, many-layered percussion parts and dissonant harmonies. Taken together (and given Herndon's lefty political tendencies), it all read like a commentary on the overwhelming waste of industrial capitalism, like an abstract rendering of the Chinese landfills where all our cellphones go to die.
By the end of her set, however, Herndon had proved that she's just as much of a no-nonsense dance floor producer as she is a political thinker. Around the 40-minute mark she dropped some deformed electro banger that hit so hard I inadvertently let out an audible moan, and dance parties briefly broke out in pockets of the otherwise aloof audience. Her live show's versatility is impressive: it has both conceptual substance and more immediate physical cues that vibrate through your body. It contains encoded meanings and process-based decisions that listeners can play with and tease apart, but not at the expense of form—for that reason it offers an interesting intervention into the art/dance dichotomy. "Q: So much thinking I wanna dance," read a text message on the wall behind Herndon as the set reached its apex. The man behind the laptop paused, typed and press the return button: "A: False dilemma bro."