Holly Herndon in Bandcamp's blog

photo by Bennet Perez

“The question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing,” said Pierre Schaeffer, describing his development of musique concrète. From the 1940s beginnings of this early form of electronic music, Schaeffer attempted to extract the sounds of the outside world, and then abstract them from their origins to create fully-realized soundscapes, transforming the noises of train engines into unrecognizable forms that referenced nothing but themselves.

Composer, sound artist, and vocalist Holly Herndon has picked up several intriguing strands where musique concrète left off and brought them fully into our digital century onPlatform—her second full-length, out now on 4AD and RVNG Intl. For “Chorus,” one ofPlatform’s central tracks, she draws on Schaeffer-esque “net-concrete,” an electronic patch—developed by artist and Herndon collaborator Mat Dryhurst—that samples audio content from web browsing. The result is an array of heterogeneous sounds, a sonic approximation of the relentless but unified swirl of activity that comprises how we use the Internet today. The actual chorus of “Chorus” seems to deconstruct the very concept of a refrain, mashing together differently pitched vocal samples into a single musical line; it is anthemic but composite, fractured but resolute.

Herndon balances her touring career with work toward a doctorate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. 

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE AND HEAR MORE MUSIC BY HERNDON:
http://blog.bandcamp.com/2015/05/19/do-you-feel-me/