Watch: Holly Herndon “Chorus”

22 Jan 2014 — Evelyn Malinowski

Watching Akihiko Taniguchi's video for "Chorus" for a second time, I found myself rummaging for familiar items, like the F.A.T. sticker on the closed laptop toward the beginning of the video, and later the Spree Quelle bottle. When familiar colors/shapes/messages pass so quickly, and amid so many other souvenirs, conscious recognition doesn't take place without stagnation: there's a time lag of sorts. We see the stack of banana peels but they don't register as a stack of banana peels until a moment later.

That's not to say that the pace of this chorus of workspaces is a notably rapid one; on the contrary, the pace works perfectly with the controlled layers, textures, and curiosity neatly sewn in Holly Herndon's track. It's the clutter that makes objects and words hard to grasp. And it's the clutter that fills the video and complements the suffocation in the music, the struggle to get a clear clip of human, more-than-phonetic vocals. There's also something to be said about the suffocation of working from home. Presumably some of the smaller, clearer desks we see are the desks of individuals who don't work at home. While Herndon and Taniguchi's collaboration takes up issues of internet privacy and space as witnessed through virtual communication, it seems that in turn it furthermore comments on space filled by objects, the longing to want to clean it out and procrastinating, or the possibility that some people work well in confusion. The clearest, most comprehensible parts of the video and music are in the beginning, when we view fragments of the two artists' Skype correspondence, before dealing with the details of what lies around the scoped screen. Still, the essence of this video is indeed the viewing of the inside of people's private spheres, both through the webcam and outside of it.

Chorus EP is out now on RVNG Intl. You can order it here.