The other side of "Chorus", a 12'' single issued at the start of the year by the globally minded electronic producer Holly Herndon, sounds like an audition tape for the relatively esoteric sound-art label Editions Mego. During "Solo Voice", slivers and snapshots of her voice twist into pointillist spires—chirpy and more musical than the most recent experiments of clear inspiration Florian Hecker, but only by degrees. Even Herndon’s most kinetic work has always seemed as driven by ideas as approachability, and "Solo Voice" is an unabashed expression of the former. Could a disembodied and dissected human voice be built into something new with computers?

"Chorus" explores a similar line of inquiry. Herndon splits her simple, fetching melody into bits, so that her words seem sung by a cyborg programmed with a speech impediment. Syllables end abruptly, stand alone, and stretch over open space. But Herndon twists those samples of herself around beats that sometimes boom and burst like dubstep and sometimes stutter and sprint like IDM. In the space between the two, Herndon laces a panoply of fragments gathered piecemeal as she browsed online. The result, vividly illustrated in a subsequent video collaboration with Japanese artist Akihiko Taniguchi, blurs the relationship between web and browser, machine and user, data and devourer. Herndon becomes the principal input in a system bigger than herself, and she tries to be altered without being absorbed. It’s a canny reflection on our digital lives, rendered with a physicality that pulls it back into our own mainframe. —Grayson Haver Currin

Holly Herndon: "Chorus"