It’s credit to Holly Herndon’s skill as a musical guide that her third album, though up to its elbows in complex ideas, feels so invigorating.
It’s great, difficult, enjoyable, rewarding, prescient – a notable work of art. It wouldn’t be surprising if the years to come recognise it as such.
PROTO demonstrates that small data and machine learning can be used to evolve our practices of art, community, and tradition, using AI to enhance our most human practices.
While PROTO could be impressive for its groundbreaking nature alone, Herndon's meditations on the relationship between humans and increasingly sentient technology are moving and filled with a sense of wonder that makes a rewarding coexistence with AI seem more than possible.
Sounding more like the future than ever before, Holly Herndon broadens the scale and scope of her practice yet again on PROTO.
The album is full of anticipation. At times it’s ugly and overblown. But it’s a collective vision, one that reflects back on our own inputs into the dataset as well as at our folk stories of survival and resistance.
What sets Herndon apart is her ability to find the optimism in this information overload, the belief that, much like the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey, an unfathomable technological leap might ultimately drag humanity along with it, not resigning us to the recycle bin but instead producing our next evolutionary step.
PROTO is Herndon’s most technologically adventurous work to date, but it is also by far her most ecstatically humanistic.
After observing how these soft machines behave when emitting frequencies together, I am assured that this is of significant import to both our futures. After all, time is on our side.
Herndon counters the hysteria around AI with an album that presents it as a quizzical, cute pet on the leash of a human master: a sensitive, responsive part of the family.
PROTO vacillates between ecstasy and anxiety, collapsing one into the other, and perfectly captures the conflicted feelings many possess as we face the future.
PROTO is already one-of-a-kind, but there are times when Herndon could’ve stood to push the envelope just a bit more ... But she’s in a class of her own when it comes to this sort of electronic pioneering.
Proto is a very distinctive record, and its sound design is as astounding as we’ve come to expect from Herndon. It’s also deeply powerful, as its crystalline tones call to mind the ghost in the machine, and leaves the listener wondering what further symbiosis can be achieved.
Her results are most memorable in the raw, quiet moments, where the ensemble's mongrel hide shows through.
Successful collaborations between humans and AI is the key motive after all for Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst to create Spawn and the majority of PROTO is all three of them working together in harmony to create a unique record.
PROTO sounds both like and unlike the sum of its parts: impersonal but human, robotic but curiously beautiful.
It’s something that needs time, that needs effort, and that might not be to everyone’s taste - but ‘PROTO’ is surely something to marvel at, even if it often doesn’t sound great.
Holly Herndon’s new album is partially aided by A.I. and features some creative, futuristic art pop pieces—but there are plenty of half-baked experiments as well. Results are mixed.
Created with the help of an A.I baby called Spawn and choirs of human and artificial beings, this third studio release from San Francisco-based sound artist and composer explores the possibility of a distant collaboration with the mechanical and the machine that feeds us. A work of utmost ambition and scope.
Holly Herndon's new album was a pretty big disappointment for me. While I appreciate the conceptual weight of this project, I found the album forgettable and not intense enough. What I loved so much about her previous record, Platform, was this constant curiosity without regard for a specific sound or melodic line. The music was paradoxically organic and contrived, but it made for an album always searching for resolve. Proto asks a fascinating question and utilizes the human voice more than ... read more
The anachronistic combination of various folk song traditions and an AI program Holly co-created and taught to sing, PROTO is the sound of an uncertain future where human inputs contend with increasingly sophisticated software in the search for a means of artistic expression.
The album is at its best on songs like "Frontier," where the line between human and artifical voice is blurred beyond distinction. In sharp contrast to the machine-induced destruction the lyrics try to warn ... read more
Wow... this is by far my longest review. Sorry. It's a lot of rambling and a lot of switching subjects. But I had a lot of thoughts about this album and by god I am going to get them all out!
So anyone who knows me knows that I like experimental music and there's a certain type of experimental music that doesn't have an easily definable genre but some of my favourite artists of all time fall into it, such as katie gately, anna meredith, bjork, and dan deacon. I call it "experimental ... read more
1 | Birth 1:14 | |
2 | Alienation 3:43 | 57 |
3 | Canaan (Live Training) 1:42 | 56 |
4 | Eternal 4:45 | 81 |
5 | Crawler 5:57 | 50 |
6 | Godmother 2:29 | 70 |
7 | Extreme Love 2:34 | 50 |
8 | Frontier 4:27 | 88 |
9 | Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt 3:12 | 50 |
10 | SWIM 4:40 | 60 |
11 | Evening Shades (Live Training) 1:30 | 50 |
12 | Bridge 2:49 | 40 |
13 | Last Gasp 5:10 | 60 |
#6 | / | DJ Mag |
#6 | / | Dummy |
#13 | / | Stereogum |
#17 | / | No Ripcord |
#17 | / | NPR Music |
#19 | / | Les Inrocks |
#21 | / | Slant Magazine |
#29 | / | PopMatters |
#32 | / | BrooklynVegan |
#34 | / | Noisey |