Movement

An award-winning composer who as a teenager left the comfortable confines of Tennessee for Berlin\'s cocoon-like club culture, Holly Herndon strikes a strangely human balance between highbrow hooks and lobe-liquefying dance music on her rather brave debut record, *Movement*. Truth be told, the only \"normal\" track here is “Fade,” a through-the-looking-glass take on techno that’d make perfect sense in the middle of a heady DJ set. Everything else seems to be a study in what it means to be alive in a world of paranoid androids and laptop-tethered life forces, from the acid-splashed melodies and demonic choruses of “Movement” to the speaker-panning breathing exercises of “Terminal.” It’s no wonder that New York’s Museum of Modern Art recently asked Herndon to perform at PS1, its satellite location in Queens. *Movement* is a red-blooded art installation that’s a few remixes away from becoming a full-on floor-filler.

Holly Herndon’s Movement is the debut offering of material by the young musician, modernist, and machinist. Restless for reckless cultural immersion, Herndon left her Johnson City, Tennessee home as a teenager for Berlin, Germany. For several years, Herndon lived and learned techno music as party dweller and performer, eventually returning wide-minded to the States to pursue a Masters in Electronic Music at Mills College. Under the guidance of network pioneer John Bischoff, Roscoe Mitchell, and Maggi Payne, Herndon pursued her experiments with processed voice and explored embodiment in electronic music, earning the Elizabeth Mills Crothers award for best composer in 2011. Started at the end of Herndon’s studies, Movement is a test chamber that hybridizes her modern composition training and undying devotion to club music. To this extent, the influences of Maryanne Amacher and Galina Ustvolskaya are as prevalent in Herndon’s music as Pan Sonic and Berlin and Birmingham 90s techno. Still, in line with pop deconstructionists Laurie Anderson and Art of Noise, Movement is purposefully positioned to reach new ears beyond a niche.

Using her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, the Calif.-based composer arrives at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation. Her impressive debut owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries.

Though such strands of thought have been present on the fringes of experimental music since its genesis, within the last several years we’ve seen a newly academic take on the textural possibilities of the human voice and how those possibilities can be integrated into established forms. Composers worldwide are doing their best Alvin Lucier impersonations,