Unsound Headliner Holly Herndon's Unique Approach To Songwriting

"Am I looking to create new sounds and processes?" Holly Herndon says, aloud, as if making sure of the question; the American electro-composer's entire experimental metier condensed into a simple inquiry. "Yeah, absolutely, for sure. That's one of the main things that I try to do. Not just like novelty for novelty's sake, but that's what keeps the studio interesting for me. If I'm dealing with a specific topic, I try to think about what [process] can get me to that endpoint. If I'm going to write a song about surveillance, it makes less sense to me to pick up a guitar to write a song about it. It makes more sense to use software where I can spy on myself, then use that soundworld to make a piece about it. Trying to enter the topic itself through the process makes the work more rich, and makes me understand the subject matter."

The 37-year-old's second LP, 2015's Platform, is "chockfull of ideas". If there's a central thesis, it's that, as Herndon says, simply, "we're receiving information in such a dramatically different way than we did even ten years ago; the amount of things that come across my eyeballs in just the course of a single day is insane". In reflecting the cacophony of digital culture, Herndon makes her songs cacophonous, uses the internet as a compositional tool.

Home, her track on the modern-day surveillance state, is a "break-up song with the NSA". The video for Interference buries the viewer under an avalanche of uncloseable pop-ups. Locker Leak turns phrases of marketing banality into cut-up poetry. And Lonely At The Top is built from the stock sound-effects meant to trigger feelings via ASMR. Each song brought with it extensive "musical research", software built and customised to cater to each idea.

"It's not necessarily like a thesis," Herndon offers, "it's [more] like a research journal, like a collection of notes. There's so many different little wormholes to go down. There's ASMR, surveillance culture, so many little things to unwrap and unravel. I think people really like when there's some meat to dig into."

Herndon is speaking from her adopted home in Berlin. It's far from where she grew up, in small-town Johnson City, Tennessee, in the Appalachian mountains ("close to where Dolly Parton grew up," Herndon says); where she yearned to be an artist and travel. After a stint living in Berlin, and completing her studies at Mills College, she finally released her first LP, Movement, in 2012. "Every show I'd every played had either been for free or for gas money [but] I was still playing all the time. So, after playing for years, I thought 'I really should document this'," Herndon recalls. "By then, I had been making music for a really long time. I just had no expectation that anyone would care enough to support it, that I would be fortunate enough that I could do this with my life. I was really shocked when anybody else cared."

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