Showing posts with label holly herndon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holly herndon. Show all posts

Apr 20, 2017

You want to read about music? Here's some politics


I'm not going to bore you with a political post. This is a music blog. You want to read about music, right? Right.

That said, what the hecking flip is going on in my country?

Firstly, we have a Brexit fuelled by phone-hacking hacks and the kind of chin-drooping chump who pronounces "Eng-er-land" with its syllables three miles apart.

Secondly, Lady Voldemort calls a snap election because she's panicking about the waning fires she's stoking in the portal to hell that is our economic future.

Yeesh. Bring back the simplicity of poll tax riots, silent Criminal Justice Bill remixes and MPs defiling themselves with fruit in their gobs.

The UK political landscape is a fire in a dumpster truck. Or whatever the British version of that is. A kerfuffle in a wheelie bin. A dust-up in a dustbin. A situation a skip.

At least we're going to get some interesting music. Whether it's the angst of Holly Herndon (pictured), the dystopia of Gorillaz or the hashtag-problems of Stormzy, our soundtrack has never sounded better as we hurtle screaming into oblivion.

See. This was about music. Pfffrt.

Dec 31, 2015

Best electronic albums of 2015: three


3 – Holly Herndon – Platform (4AD)

Holly Herndon destroyed music in 2015. She picked it up by earlobes and broke its face off. She then picked the fragments off the muddy floor then polished them up into a towering audio sculpture so astonishing, there is, was and will never be nothing like it again.

This is Platform, a sequence of ten tracks that takes in surveillance, synthesis, pop music and Autechisms (yeah, that’s a word now). It’s so far removed from the hackneyed phrases of popular EDM that this has become an album that – emphasis with a capital N – Needs to exist.

Amid all the ethereal abstraction, you wouldn't expect Chorus to actually have a chorus, you wouldn't expect Locker Leak to end up being her version of Everyone's Free (To Wear Sunscreen), and the opening horror of New Ways To Love suprises when it turns out to be a gateway to what might be a dungeon of choristers.

For something so alien, it doesn’t half stick in your mind after listening. Everything's broken and I think I like it.

-----> Best electronic albums of 2015 <-----