Live Review: Unsound: Holly Herndon

Avant-garde electronic producer Holly Herndon brought her Platform show to Adelaide for the second night of this year's Unsound Festival.

Herndon performed as a trio with Colin Self adding vocals and creative dance, and live visual effects triggered through an onstage laptop and webcam by Mat Dryhurst. Interestingly the visuals on screen often demanded all the audience's attention because a big onscreen notepad was used for all greetings and crowd interactions, leaving the performers mute and only using their voices to sing. It was through the notepad that the audience learnt of difficult times experienced by the artists and the following struggle to create the album with the same title, Platform.

Central to the performance was the use of vocals, never quite in their pure state but altered through technology. Herndon and Self's voices soared over the instrumental anarchy, mostly in nonsensical " uuuhs" and " aaahs". A lot of the heavy lifting came from their transformation through pitch and tone bending, distortion and other effects.

The rhythms were at times disjointed and complicated and in other moments followed common time with a straight hitting dance beat. Very particular and difficult to accept sonically was hearing all these modern-sounding samples when they were introduced in tribal syncopated rhythms. This highlighted how much we can be dominated by the expectations created when listening to music that 'follows the rules'.

If in any instant during the performance one grappled on to a sense of harmony in the music, it seemed to be swiftly crushed. For example, a relentless repetition of a chord, which in itself creates angst, though ultimately underpins the music harmonically, would then be topped by Herndon's quite melodic vocal line which completely ignored if not went against the harmony presented by the repeated chord. Everything about Herndon's performance was chaotic. Musical ideas that would normally never meet spent time fighting alongside each other, mostly going on to die off without one of them prevailing, allowing the tension and unease they created to be the real winner.