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May 13, 2019The continuity stressed between body and tool, folk history and future, like the work of Meredith Monk or Björk, lures the listener away from the twin traps of techno-evangelist complacency and technophobic retreat with sweet inspiration.
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May 7, 2019It’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.
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May 14, 2019PROTO 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.
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May 13, 2019While 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.
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May 13, 2019The 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.
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May 7, 2019You don't just feel unburdened of "progress" dysphoria, you feel like you've emerged from the paradigm equipped with a new language to help you navigate the next one.
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Jun 10, 2019PROTO is a rare work that matches incredible conceptual ideas with accessibility for even the most passive of listeners. Impenetrable aural academia this is not. This album makes you think more and more with each listen as its layered brilliance unravels in new, exciting ways.
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May 14, 2019Herndon and her ensemble displace the human voice from its usual setting just enough that it startles the ear. But that displacement allows you to hear voices as if for the very first time, listening ravenously for proof that out there in the unknown, someone besides yourself exists and is singing.
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May 17, 2019Proto 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.
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Q MagazineMay 14, 2019PROTO sometimes hews close to well-worn dystopian tropes, and the child narrator and see-sawing breath sounds of Extreme Love are undeniably annoying. But Herndon's creative restlessness and textural mastery sustain interest across 45 minutes. [Jul 2019, p.108]
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May 14, 2019For listeners coming into the album without knowledge of its overarching concept, PROTO is also full of pop-forward compositions that are striking in their own right. ... For a record about the development of machine cognition, PROTO is remarkably human at every turn.
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May 10, 2019The whole album wobbles with the uncertainty of potential. The composition tumbles between folk, pop, techno and computer music. Sometimes it’s unrefined like the untethered looping of ‘Bridge’ and sometimes dazzling and terrifying like ‘Crawler’, a track that builds toward the edge of sentience--but it’s never short on ideas.
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May 10, 2019PROTO is already one-of-a-kind, but there are times when Herndon could’ve stood to push the envelope just a bit more, instead of giving lovely but somewhat slight and redundant moments like ‘Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt’ or the ‘Live Training’ interludes. But she’s in a class of her own when it comes to this sort of electronic pioneering.
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May 10, 2019Herndon 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.
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May 7, 2019PROTO vacillates between ecstasy and anxiety, collapsing one into the other, and perfectly captures the conflicted feelings many possess as we face the future. A crucial step forward, its approach demonstrates that maintaining human agency alongside radical, new technologies can produce both bewildering and beautiful results that perhaps nobody, not even Herndon, could have predicted.
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May 13, 2019Though Spawn only features on about a third of the album, the AI's conceptual impact is key to Proto. ... The compositions elsewhere are dense and overwhelming.
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UncutMay 7, 2019While "Godmother" confounds with its sci-fi babble, the likes of "Alienation" and "External" suggest that a tune is a tune in any language. [Jun 2019, p.29]
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The WireMay 7, 2019Most of the vocals elsewhere are unintelligible, blurred between endless layers of patchworked echolalia or overlaid with metal grid sheen and a mesh of hissing and crunching, skittering beats far removed from any sense of body based, physically entrained rhythm. But ultimately it’s just a shonkier version of the cut-ups and vocal splices Herndon’s been working with since her 2014 12" Chorus. [May 2019, p.52]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 30
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Mixed: 0 out of 30
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Negative: 4 out of 30
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May 10, 2019
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May 13, 2019
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Jun 1, 2019