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Live Music Review Holly Herndon, Barbican London

Audio-visual excellence from an electronic music pioneer

FOREVER pushing the boundaries of electronic music’s potential, Holly Herndon will never settle on simply performing behind a laptop, as this show proves.

Joined onstage by a vocal ensemble and collaborator Mathew Dryhurst, Herndon gives a full run-through of her acclaimed third album PROTO, a stunning achievement that explores the relationship between humans and technology.

On the album, Herndon introduces Spawn, a singing AI that she has been developing over a number of years with Dryhurst and programmer Jules LaPlace.

Herndon feeds various vocals and compositions into Spawn which then contributes its own alien-like voice — a bit like having a choir with R2-D2 in it.

With some of the choir dressed in medieval attire, the end result is an eerie blend of pastoral folk-singing and disjointed harmonies from the far future.

Herndon’s solo piece Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt demonstrates the skill and beauty in her voice, even if it sounds rather like Cher overdoing it on the vocoder.

There are some dazzling visuals by Dario Alva and on Canaan, choral contributors Evelyn Saylor and Franziska Aigner appear to move across landscape artwork, while on Frontier lay singers from the London Sacred Harp choral group seated in the auditorium stand to join the chorus.

Herndon’s “AI baby,” as she calls it, is unable to make the live show as it still needs some fine tuning, bringing to mind HAL 9000’s apology in 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Perhaps humans are better off without technology after all.

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