it is a rare scenario where i'm going to judge a record by the tools made to use it, so i wanted to actually listen to this holly herndon record (which you can stream on youtube, despite the link to the paywall on bandcamp) before i posted an analysis of it, but i guess the basic reality you have to come up against before you can really analyze it is that this is fundamentally a record built around two components:

(1) autotuned vocals
(2) cinematic heavyocity drum samples (which were built for use in film scores rather than music)

now, you can go off on a spiel about the ai bit if you want, but i'm ultimately going to listen to this and if you write me a thousand line program that, in the end, sounds like an autotuned pop song, i'm just going to kind of shrug it off and tell you it sounds like an autotuned pop song. i'm not going to concern myself with how you designed your autotuned pop song so much as i'm going to interpret it as what it is.

this isn't quite as boring as the bulk of contemporary pop, but the fact is that it isn't that different from it, either. where it differs from it is primarily in the vocal harmonization, which is certainly more developed, but that's not always to it's benefits; at some point, you also have to ask yourself why, exactly, you're listening to a gregorian chant, or, worse, a white woman appropriate black church music by getting a computer to perform the parts.

my primary takeaway from the record is actually that she'd be more interesting if she pulled away from the technology a little. this is essentially being marketed as a gimmick, but i'd actually argue that the pure musicality of it is more interesting than all of the gadgets being used are, and it may actually come across better as purely choiral music.

it's dynamic, though. and, i'm going to spend a bit longer listening to it. as was the case with the floating points disc, i'm willing to give her a passing grade on listenability, even if i'm actually not that impressed by the academic component.

https://hollyherndon.bandcamp.com/album/proto