Platform

This is very much an album that feels necessary right now--one that packs a political punch without being didactic or evangelical--and offers positive thinking, including a clarion call of co-operative and community responses to global issues.

It's always drifting, skilfully, from challenging noise to fragmented affection in the most beguiling way possible.

Platform is not a manifesto, but it feels like a galvanising challenge to Herndon's peers to embolden their ideas, broaden their horizons and push on into an undiscovered continent of sound. [Jun 2015, p.70]

Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year.

While still creating boundless, exceptional fringe-pop, on Platform Herndon is finding countless new ways to hold our attention: deploying a greater sense of narrative, an emboldened melodic arsenal and enough enthusiasm to remind us why she remains a vital voice in peripheral pop.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

Just as Holly Herndon's debut album Movement had abundant layers in its title alone, its follow-up Platform is just as nuanced in how it combines political, technological and structural and ideological concepts into a single word.

On her second album she manages to sound both futuristic and steeped in history.

The ten laptop compositions of Platform are brilliant, thrilling articulations of many of her ideas. [May 2015, p.50]

At once Herndon’s most accessible and most adventurous record, this is digital age avant-garde sound art put through a pop prism, and it’s all the more exciting as a result.

It’s another classy effort from an increasingly great band.

Platform is always engaged and engaging, the questions it raises never merely academic. [Jun 2015, p.107]

Excepting curious conceptual moments like massage fantasy ‘Lonely At The Top'--Platform can concentrate on being beautiful electronic pop: think The Knife 2.0, perhaps.

Platform is continuously emotive, although it never quite tops the peak of “Chorus”.

Platform is a record that reveals itself slowly. An intelligent, intoxicating electronica record that draws the listener in and revealing new truths as it goes.

Everything about this finely wrought yet diabolically chaotic album feeds a theme: The more we try to manicure reality, in life and online, the messier it gets.

Even if this record isn't perfect, it's clear that she will become an influential figure in high-brow electronic music.

Holly Herndon is far too conceptual to ever really merit banal classification as a techno or electronic producer, and with a bigger platform (intentional), she shows that her vision opens a multitude of possibilities that go beyond genre. Platform isn’t the album to realize that potential, so obvious since Movement, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the future.

It’s structurally confounding, simultaneously weirder and more welcoming than any of the other material she’s released to date.