I Will Be Gone

Holly Herndon “Morning Sun”

Holly Herndon’s music is done few favors by her most fawning press, which tends to indulge the contrived gallery “artist’s statement” rhetorical of her promotional materials and talks about technology in a way that already seems hopelessly behind the curve. I’m sure Herndon believes what she’s saying and is no kind of idiot, but she’s falling into trap for many contemporary artists, particularly those whose work is mostly abstract: A desire to over-explain the themes they have in mind because they apparently have no faith for their audience to intuit them with just the art itself. I totally understand this, particularly as a person who has gone through art school and has first-hand experience with this sort of thing, but it bugs me because it combines the worst of pandering to media and anxiety about being misunderstood.

Herndon’s music works just fine on its own. It is not a lecture about technology and capitalism, and it is better for that. Herndon is a very gifted composer, and is particularly good with texture and layering, and in letting her tracks gradually build without a forced sense of drama. “Morning Sun” is a pastoral folk song at its core, but it’s inside a tangled net of electronic tones and clicks. The sound implies a natural world in harmony with a synthetic one, but the song doesn’t aggressively nudge you into thinking about that. You just enter the world of the song, and live inside it, and it can just be a simple, lovely thing.

Buy it from Amazon.