Name: Holly Herndon and Jace Clayton in conversation
Uploaded: 2020-01-20T12:28:28.000Z
Duration: 20 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I think one of the first things I noticed about your work...

I was in London soon after James Blake's...

his sort of, breakthrough hit came through...

And I was talking to my friend, I was like, what an interesting progression,

and then started putting in his voice as kind of a process thing...

and then suddenly it's like this pop territory, so moving from...

a sort of invisibility, an honest producer, into like, and I said it to a journalist friend

and he was like "oh, yeah. He's got a high powered manager"

and "he's very handsome" and he was like, it's a very commercial move

had this similar, kind of starting off... at least in what reached me...

as being very abstracted, and then slowly ideas, a voice and invisibility...

went into it in a way that didn't feel like it was a commercial move

but rather, it was part of a very, kind of fascinating, artistic trajectory...

and sort of, statement that you were making.

but it was following your sounds for like two years or so.

And so I'm just kind curious about how you think about that; these longer arks...

when people are following your work, and like you said, y'know...

like what is... maybe singing is a very vulnerable thing for you, but...

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point.

I think there's a lot of factors that went into that

I mean, you know, one of them is just like what I was interested in,

and investigating, kind of like pushed me.

Especially with Chorus a little bit but especially with Home...

having to find that vulnerable place and put myself forward a little bit.

So there's, just some of that, y'know, just like thematically

kind of pushed me in that way, but also...

Y'know, just my own comfort level... I still don't think of myself as a vocalist

or, like a pop singer or anything like that, you know...

that's never really how I've perceived myself.

So it was always just... it's been this kind of evolution of like...

how can I push myself to different places where I'm still...

where I'm uncomfortable but it's still me, where I'm, y'know, challenging myself.

So I think it's partly personal, and I think it's also partly cultural;

I think that the landscape has changed from when I started...

from when Movement came out to today, I feel like people are...

people have shifted their perspective, people are more open to things.

I feel like genres are more smashed together, I feel like...

pop isn't as dirty of a word as it was several years ago.

It's funny, I was at Unsound a couple of weeks ago, when it's like...

Not that people weren't smiling at Unsound 3 years ago,

but it was definitely more like this kinda thing...

and this year is way more like this kinda thing, and I was like...

I don't know, I just think that attitudes and shifts change

I'm also responding to my environment in that way.

Seeing again the Chorus video and the Home video, I was reminded of how

I mean I like them both quite a bit because Chorus, it's....

you're really grappling with this idea of what is contemporary space...

you know, you're inside the home, you're inside the laptop,

there's products floating around, there's no sort of outside world.

And so, to me that links into this idea of

of the laptop being this very intimate instrument

And there kind is no escape from the wires

and the signals that are permeating us now.

So then the question becomes: what do you... what now, what next?

Yeah, and what kind of ownership do we wanna take over it, or you know

do we as artists wanna be driving the conversation

or do we wanna be on the reactionary side,

where we're constantly like, off of our foot.

I'm like really mangling phrases today...

You know what I'm saying though, but like...

and that's one thing that I find really inspiring about artists

who are also working in areas of digital activism and...

and software development. I know I keep talking about Mat Dryhurst,

He just released a piece of software called Saga that's all around...

kind of this idea of self-hosting and artists having their own agency...

So I find that kind of stuff really inspiring and I love it when artists are like...

really kind of awake and aware and interested in kind of...

having some sort of agency in where the conversation is going.

And I feel like, sorry... just on top of that,

I feel like that takes a degree of optimism, I feel like...

like, I love a dystopian artwork and I love like, y'know, post-apocalyptic...

like, course, I love science fiction, we all do.

I also draw on those aesthetics sometimes but I feel like...

when we're constantly in that kind of negative zone

or in that kind of like fatalistic zone...

I feel like in a way, that kind of is like "whup, well I can't do anything"...

it kinda like, you know, takes the burden of us.

So I feel like we have to pair that with a degree of optimism...

and a degree of, kind of like, forward propelling motion,

so that we can actually have some sort of say in the way that things are going.

I was having a conversation about science fiction literature with a friend

and he was just like, it's 95% dystopian, and this wasn't always the case

if you look back to the 60s, people are writing these books are envisioning

a totally different and less grim history.

Our future, and like, what does that mean if our imagination is already

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Holly Herndon and Jace Clayton in conversation

awkward

vulnerable

weird

constantly