The following is a music review (similar to what I did before and before) where I write what comes to me as I listen to Holly Herndon’s new album, Platform:
1. “Interference”
Traverse time apart from/next to myself
Dedicated machinery, joints dance, hum of fast-paced rise and fall
Linking slow and sudden
Stutter clearly, throughout. The fundamental frequency of great shifts.
Shift to quiet. Shift in circles. Pulse out. Outer ripples provide the current rhythm reverberating back, activating other nodes. Laser cutting across dark matter, loping looping space falling apart fa fa falling apart.
2. “Chorus”
Saw cut drops of you forming yous singing drops in a lake well bouncing systematically static image of yous
Yous like reflections of machine yous.
Whisper something distorted telephone whisper something
Cut the transmission evenly
Segments of whole yous
Harmonizing wriggling beings in each casing
Fast forward to hum run
Fast forward to blessing segments
Beat steady melody breaking apart
(When was this ever a song?)
Clattering pans
Shaking steel sheets
Here yous are again, rushing in your measure
Sustain high pitched oh
3. “Unequal”
My misty
Sing pret du sing
Why human for?
Didgeridoo hum static underneath
Way knitty
Way ha neet oh
Ee or ah ee
Messianic message backwards what’s the message
Oh honesty?
I carry each other?
Or? Or? Res oh or?
Without meaning, the angelic chorus accompanies anyway
Future to be not afraid
The angels are mechanical, tablesaw wings spinning
Smoky vision of heavenly dripping industrialization
4. “Morning Sun”
I begin the fall with descending stair I belong
Cross each other on staircases
Playback: cross each other on staircases on spinning anime jungle light background scene
You (indecipherable) fall
Layered falling
The skin repeated
Flat plain with corkscrewing staircases entering and exiting the earth
Loop harmonies, high hat dripping upward into Jesus or t shirts or teach us
5. “Locker Leak”
Who lasts? Glass lasts wind whispers breath in/out voice looped over itself
Wet bar wax
Bleached in gold
Glass lasts
A friendly first
On tap in Terra cotta
Greek yogurt commercial
Wet bar wax
Collage of pressure points
Candle
Baked in earth
Elongated utterances
Dripping slowly
Skin and fruit
What mystery! What museum!
Curbed plastic
In gold
Found funds
In field each ear is a coastline of text
6. “Exit”
Slide up/down/slow/water leak
Day after day
Time felt in labored robotic spurts
Sisphean swelling song
Moments of gleaming
Cut frames of mouth song
Repeated echoes of what had been said with
Sail away
If I were to sail away
Breathe
Breathe
An asthmatic robot chorus fits and starts of
Nothing to
Nothing to
Combined android version of a song made of live and dead parts humming at different time signatures
Breathing sigh abrupt eyes open shut
7. “Lonely at the Top”
I’m a CEO getting a massage typing an email
Sexy breathy lips warm breath yes yes yeah yeah you deserve it
Knock knock
Water wrung out of a wet rag into a
bowl
Run the rag across skin
Whisper awe
Whacking side palm
Sitting up, change the seats
Dead inside
Yes yes yeah yeah
More trite aphorisms about achievement
Dead inside
Sucking sound
I don’t know how you do it
8. “DAO”
Rustling punch rattling punch punch boxer side side breath sigh pummel meat mess breath breath
Tic tic spin with pummeling meat sound faster
Trill phantom singer
Balloon losing air
(Diamanda Galas wrote this)
Knock knock
There’s no pain, just spinning cyber punching
There never was a body
Operatic soprano of nothing
The film reels off
9. “Home”
She sings with her chorus of selves tentacling beneath her birthed clean separation whirling around the mother
Half radio static, half human
Under water, everything pins out pricking neatly
The truest love is a mother’s love for her automaton brood building oceanic cityscapes
Collapsing death? No dark descent to further swirling depths
Build lit coral future cities
I know that you know me better than I know me repeated
I can feel you in my (indecipherable from pounding construction sound)
Oxygen blowing out come up for air laughing
10. “New Ways to Love”
Vortex travel across cuts of cavernous time between slits of space
Travel as fast as light while floating heavenly pulse locator
Cosmos bursting
Chorus reverberating and echoing the blasts
Spin across sandstorms of radio waves
Orbit suspended explosions
Creation/destruction are the same
Light/dark/hum/crash/whelps of death
Walking across concrete and turning
Car fan dying
Her footsteps end
