Holly Herndon at The Lab

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Holly Herndon at The Lab

By Red Bull Music Academy Radio

Date and time

Sunday, March 1, 2015 · 7:30 - 11pm PST

Location

The Lab

2948 16th Street San Francisco, CA 94103

Refund Policy

Contact the organizer to request a refund.

Description

holly flyer

Red Bull Music Academy and Noise Pop present

Holly Herndon (Live)

w/ Akihiko Taniguchi, Mat Dryhurst & Michael Guidetti

Opening set: Russell E.L. Butler (Opal Tapes)


There is nothing predictable in the work of San Francisco-based computer music maestro Holly Herndon. Raised in East Tennessee, choral music and bluegrass formed the bedrock of her experience, with the former providing a solid schooling in using her voice as an instrument. A move to Berlin sparked an interest in the improvisatory and performative aspects of electronic music, and the pulse of a kick drum became a kind of MIDI clock underpinning her entire approach – as a Stanford doctoral candidate in music composition, the why and how behind her music are intricately linked. Her work has been described as a celebration of empathic human-computer relations. On her shimmering site-specific cassette and album respectively for THIRDSEX and RVNG Intl., Herndon’s laptop and her custom-built software are bionic extensions of her own voice, mind and limbs. The native sounds of machines are treated less as source material and rather as organic by-product: the hum of a computer’s inner workings picked up by induction mics, which she wields in her fingers with theremin-like sweeps. And yet her music feels intensely familiar: full of the abandon, imagination and physicality of the electronic music canon – in which a love-affair with the sounds of machines is at the very core. Whether collaborating with Chicago house iconoclastHieroglyphic Being, performing alongside Robert Hood at Brooklyn’s Output, or in venues across Europe alongside Machinedrum or Venetian Snares – her music is electronic body music in the realest sense, and shifts effortlessly between concert halls, clubs and festival stages. An advocate for the synthesis and expression of personal and emotional data via laptops, her vision has extended to include the +dialog series of talks featuring artists like Kode9 and Bell Labs’ computer music pioneer Max Mathews, as well as a curatorial role at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, and participating as a guest editor during Dazed Digital’s Hack Your Future week: as she says, “music needs a good hack.” Whether creating sounds for next-gen electric cars, or devising an “alien palette of sounds” based on the motions of a robot for Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, one thing is for sure: Holly Herndon is generating sounds for computers to step in time to, and not the other way round.

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