hello!!!! so its been just over a year now since I've posted here last but i recently wrote a review of my current favorite song of the year, which i doubt will change, i'm truly obsessed. I'm worked p hard on it so id be very happy happy if anyone reads/has feedback!
For decades, perhaps even centuries, modern man has felt disconnected from the strife and drive of early humankind. We think of them abstractly, speaking with disconnected ease at the struggles they faced to survive the millennia so that we could live comfortably in the 21st century. While we crave the ease of the current age, many yearn for the passion and unadulterated vigor with which we color the daily lives of those of earlier times. Yet, we also view life as getting harder with each passing day: iPhones run faster, but the job market suffers. Air-conditioned rooms insulate a society burdened with the uneasy sense of doom brought about by climate change, which is coped with most often through an ironic lens. This translates into our art as well. While the past seems to have an unabashed mythic purity in its portrayal of ideals, ours seems soaked in over-analysis of the cruel systems underlying them all. These contradictory and “us vs. them” perspectives, while appealing on a superficial level, serve only to promote a pessimistic view of the history of our species, and ignores the underlying humanity and relative genetic constancy behind all of these changes.
Given how increasingly pervasive these attitudes have become, “Frontier,” Holly Herndon’s second single off of PROTO and its arguable centerpiece, feels timely, with its themes that cross generational, even epochal boundaries. It was created in part with Spawn, an AI program she developed with the help of her partner Mat Dryhurst, to learn from, imitate, and creatively synthesize the human voice. A chorus of these voices introduces the track, swelling in a holy unison to portray the human drive forward - a drive bringing about the real aforementioned changes, which can obscure this common and inherent theme that binds us to those who pressed on before. The artificial origin of these voices is not immediately noticeable, but the realization of their synthetic genesis does not make the message more sterile; in the context of a digitized world, it feels necessary to integrate such a daily part of our lives into the art that sustains us.
These voices are inspired in part by the tradition of Sacred Harp Music, once almost lost, which originated in part to bring together the wide breadth of people moved by music, regardless of their musical background. (Sacred Harp Music originally used a small number of polygons to indicate notes, removing the need for the often-exclusive ability to read traditionally written music.) Singers sit in a square formation based on vocal range and perform without accompaniment, for the sake of the music itself. This results in a truly engulfing and uplifting effect; it is truly a testament to the power we have when united as a group. The themes of this style had religious overtones, and while not always explicitly religious today, the undercurrents of the human desire for truth and God still inform how it feels to perform and to hear Sacred Harp. While a historical lens gives much reason to be skeptical of how inspired organized religion was by an actual deity, the role of the individual yen for something greater than the self have played an equal or greater role in our spiritual development, and Sacred Harp Music is as strong an argument as any for this.
Humanity is not the only constant addressed by Herndon here; nature’s role as eternal backdrop and arbiter is confronted starkly. The choir asserts that “this earth doesn’t care for what we need, what we breathe.” This indifference of our planet stretches back to our even more primordial ancestors; the Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred almost 2.5 billion years ago caused the massive accumulation of oxygen on earth. This change caused the majority of life forms, then anaerobic, to go extinct. The balance of the atmosphere is by no means guaranteed, and shifting balances today dominate headlines (and likely soon our final thoughts). Another cut off of PROTO, “Eternal Love,” frames this shift more optimistically: we were borne out from the hardiness of bacteria, we continue to harbor and spread them as we exist day today, and they will likely inherit the planet from us after our time has passed. “Thriving in extreme conditions, they proved to be more fit, better at taking the next leap. There was no doubt they could travel through space, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and spacecraft,” the young speaker on the track posits.
About midway through its runtime, “Frontier” shifts from its original choral arrangement into a rhythmic frenzy, led by Herndon’s heavily modulated vocals. She now evokes the universal themes of survival, grit, and the heroic. “Son, it's the right time, never be afraid, the run is tonight,” she commands, which could suggest a prehistoric tribe on the hunt for a woolly mammoth, but also soldiers fighting for a lost romantic cause (or the trials of unconsidered families struggling against their wonton bloodshed). The eternal human ethos of forward-movement cannot be denied and Herndon implores us not to forget this. Her seeming juxtaposition of the primal with the future is prescient. We can and must, as our biology demands, bear ourselves truly into this uncertain future, though even if we fail to persevere, our legacy lives on in the eternal dance of Earth and the cosmos. _________________ My top songs of the 2010s
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Spotify link
it's been 10 years to the day since I joined BEA!!! pretty insane to think about. grateful for the role the site has played in my musical development and hope it can keep doing that for others going forward!
for a musical update: not much. just had jaw surgery so I'm wired shut/doped up and watching tv these days. _________________ My top songs of the 2010s
and
Spotify link
it's been 10 years to the day since I joined BEA!!! pretty insane to think about. grateful for the role the site has played in my musical development and hope it can keep doing that for others going forward!
for a musical update: not much. just had jaw surgery so I'm wired shut/doped up and watching tv these days.
holy shit 10 years wild! well that is cool.
sucks about the wired up part. you should (and i know for a fact you have not heard this from anyone nor thought of it once yourself) listen to The College Dropout. And once your jaw is doing reasonably well, sing and rap the lyrics of Through The Wire. _________________ -Ryan
it's been 10 years to the day since I joined BEA!!! pretty insane to think about. grateful for the role the site has played in my musical development and hope it can keep doing that for others going forward!
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