Hell is Rising, Blessed are the Fallen: An Interview of Golpe Civil’s Loucifer

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly


photography by Joseph Kadow
photography assistance by Oskar Ott
styling by Hakan Solak
hair & makeup by Lee Hyangsoon
talent Anarchist Sound System
interview by Janna Shaw

In an exclusive interview and photoshoot for Autre, Anarchist Sound System a.k.a. Lou Desamaison-Cognet, musician and founder of Golpe Civil, unveils the complexities of modern society, critiquing a world immersed in electroslavery. Lou a.k.a. Loucifer shares insights into his own psyche as well as inspirations for his collective: from his collection of Nietzsche texts and the occult, to the visceral impact of recent love, loss, and sobriety.

 

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly

 

It was a rather mysterious assignment: could I interview a Satanic musician, producer, multi-disciplinarian artist and activist railing against a new world order? “His name is Louicifer, he’s into blood, pain, and beauty.” It was an immediate “Yes” from me. From our first correspondence, I knew Lou was a character from up my own winding back alley. It wasn’t so much the initial introductory greeting, it was the introductory email’s sign-off. Instead of the normal accolades, salutations, or questionable bisous, it was a pointed manifesto of meat: elegantly and adamantly, unabashedly transcribed, coming from not one place above, rather emanating from deep below:

“In a society governed by judgment and the elimination of acceptance, GOLPE CIVIL aims to reveal the most hidden secrets and flaws of this dirty, hypocritical, self-centered system.… We are the underworld: opponents who preach a new world, free of submission; clarity, culture for all, and rebellion. We are not only a record label, we are an experimental project created to fight corruption, false doctrines, and global manipulation.”

Who is Golpe Civil? It’s an Anarchist Sound System. It’s hell’s privately broadcast radio station. It’s a collective group of artists, primarily musicians, railing together to express their insides, no matter how unsettling it may be to the inhabitants of our planetary purgatory. But for the residents who find themselves living in their own version of hell, the rather frightening sounds of Anarchist Sound System may come across as rather benevolent.

Back to Loucifer (or Loucy as they endearingly allow their friends and demon-empathizers to summon them): the music they are creating for A.S.S. is not all electronic manipulation with high intensity BPM. Satan incarnate has side projects, of course. BLASPHEMIA is an experimental noise project based upon an apotheosis mindset, created alongside their girlfriend Darken (more on that dynamic later). NO INJURIES navigates a more delicate soundscape, featuring grand pianos with lots of Amen breaks. Satan has style and a flair for the dramatic, no surprise there.

One late & rainy night in Berlin, we exchange Telegram handles. Fallen angels prefer not to be cellularly traced, but at least they’re open to written communication. I half expect our interview to be conducted through bloody ciphers, of which, with Lou, I was admittedly not necessarily all that opposed...

Full Look: Vintage Levi’s

JANNA SHAW: Good evening Liege Loucy, you’ve been expecting me. I write to you from a very rainy, very dark Berlin. I’m listening to BLASPHEMIA, getting acquainted with you. What are you up to?

LOUCIFER: I imagine Berlin exactly the way you just described it. That’s the Berlin I love so much. The melancholy reflects onto the city during this time of year. There’s a cold, mysterious atmosphere, which I find very inspiring. Every day I am missing Berlin. My family came into Sao Paulo today, so I spent the day with them. They just left.

SHAW: I much prefer Berlin when it’s cold and grey. The Brutalist architecture makes more sense, and so does the general German attitude. Summer is too hot and happy. No one knows what to do with it. How was time with your family? Do they listen to your music?

LOUCIFER: Time with my family was very nice. We went to a restaurant and talked about how things will become December as I will leave Sao Paulo. In February, I am planning to move back to Berlin, so I have a lot of things to organize. My mother hates my music—she simply doesn’t understand it—but my father loved my music. He was always very atypical about his world perception. He pushed me hard in my music experimentation journey. Both of my parents have, actually. They are very nerdy, philosophy lovers. They understand the unconventional as long as it’s harmless. I admire them for unplugging me from a strict, basic vision.

SHAW: What do you think you’ll miss about Sao Paulo? I hear there’s a good underground scene. With your move to Berlin, you’ll be going from one underground to the next. Which do you prefer?

LOUCIFER: The scene in Brazil is really another dimension. It feels like it’s stuck in the ’90s, but in a very good way. There aren’t many clubs here—especially not techno clubs. The scene is all about illegal raves, finding the best abandoned warehouse, placing huge sound systems, and just destroying people’s minds. Berlin is a very structured scene. The underground has been feeding the city for years and years, attracting millions of tourists every day creating evolution for itself. Berlin is an established home for independent artists, businesses, clubs, agencies, etc., while Brazil is a newborn baby in comparison. It still has its innocence, but also a boldness to explore what has not been. It’s a wild country, and Sao Paulo is the center of it.

SHAW: What else is on your mind?

LOUCIFER: Tonight, I’m working on BLASPHEMIA music videos. We are going to release the project at the start of December. It’s a lot of work, but we are super happy with how it’s going. My girlfriend Darken (my BLASPHEMIA counterpart) and I broke up recently, but BLASPHEMIA is our baby, and we will continue to work on this project. Our love is infinite, but the reality is we need to split in different ways to finally meet and be together again. We are not at the same checkpoints, and we want to follow up on some of our own personal goals and projects independently.

SHAW: From the snippets I’ve seen of your project together, the Dark Arts are most certainly at play in BLASPHEMIA...

LOUCIFER: Yes, for the visual inspiration, the source comes from our BDSM background. Darken and I are both tattoo artists and art lovers. She brings the elegance and the sharpness, and I bring the raw, maniacal support to the visuals. We love to think as one, and we managed to fuse into BLASPHEMIA together instantly. We do everything together. It’s the first time in my life I’m editing/cutting videos, playing around with VFX, syncing... I’m in love with it. It’s exactly like Ableton: a bunch of rectangular clips and automations, a lot of time structure, visual guidances and so on. It’s a plug-and-play intuition. I am neurodivergent and when I get excited about something, I have an unstoppable necessity to understand every single detail of anything in the realm of my new chosen interest.

SHAW: Were there certain books, movies, artists, characters that led you to explore the notion of Satanism?

LOUCIFER: I first got into Satanism because of my name and birthday: I was born 09/06/96, my name is Lou Desamaison-Cognet, which translates to “Lou from the Broken House.” I lost my father when I was 21 years old, and my world felt apart. We had a really horrible time. He was diagnosed with bulbar sclerosis, the hardest one. I flew from Berlin to Zurich to help my mother care for him. He was a difficult man, but a warrior that refused to be defeated by anything. This led him to refuse help from the hospital until the last few days of his life. At that point, he had to, because of the euthanasia process. Watching someone you truly admire for four months, dying rapidly... This was his worst nightmare, being a prisoner of his own body. After watching that closely, everything changed for me. I had always been the kid with “no filter” but when this happened, filters quite literally did not exist. Nothing existed for me, except my creative bursts. Growing up, Nietzsche was everywhere in my life. Spinoza was my father’s favorite and Sartre is my mom’s crush. So, I had the privilege of growing up out of the box and experiencing life in my way. My friends always called me the Devil, because of my hyperactivity. But one day, I looked up Satanism on Google and found the [The Eleven Satanic] Rules of the Earth. I read them and identified with everything written in it. I live my life according to them. The interest grew bigger and bigger. I began to reread all my Nietzsche and Machiavelli books, and found an author called Michael W. Ford, which complemented the ‘Self’ section of my brain. My favorite artist of all time is a genius, Satanist, and huge AIDS activist: Diamanda Galás. She was and is ahead of any generation, in terms of music and artistic talent. She has had the most important impact on my actual music vision.

Full Look: No Faith Studios

SHAW: I find that we are currently in a world devoid of all ritual, sacrifice, and purpose. I think Diamanda would agree that we are collectively straying from religion, yet I think a lot of our human experience is lost when we totally ignore our desire and need for some kind of worship.

LOUCIFER: I can’t disagree with you. Today’s world has become a very lost civilization. The electroslavery is getting out of control. People are struggling to believe in their own lives; they’re choking from it. How can we be satisfied if everything created these days is made to keep us exactly where we are? Today’s worship is Instagram, TikTok, and all that bullshit. It’s far easier to create an online avatar than craft every day a new, expanded version of yourself. Everything is accessible by sight. Too many options to choose from. We have created a void that is very hard to fulfill.

SHAW: What led you to create the Golpe Civil collective?

LOUCIFER: I’ve been three times to rehab, back and forth. I had to lose so much to finally be where I am today. Sober and satisfied with my life, I’m giving every particle of my being to myself and my art. I realized that nobody will give a shit about you, let alone love, trust, or respect you if you can’t first do that for yourself. I wrote my Rehab EP in rehab, and created Golpe Civil there too.

SHAW: In your Rehab EP, you penned it as a call to dismantle the notion that drug usage is liberation. What does the reality of sobriety feel like for you?

LOUCIFER: Being sober gives me indescribable access into my own database. It is the most beautiful gift I could have given myself. When enslaved by substance abuse, you tend to settle for the convenient. Even if just subconsciously, you look for every alternative: excuses you can find to justify poor decisions, dismal behaviors, lack of goodwill, and a limitless amount of self-destructive patterns. You eventually accept this, and it is tattooed in your brain as truth. I’ve lived amongst the agonizing torture of that which is habit constantly fighting to take over flesh and bones.

When you explore your consciousness with the bias of a certain molecule creating new neuronal connections, firing up certain parts of your brain and enhancing perception, touch, sensibility, performance, and all of the other aspects and allures of drugs, sooner or later, you will still be faced with yourself. And that self will reclaim every single bit of time that you took from it.

At a certain glimpse of the past, I chose to only see as far as my shadow would go. I leaned into it and left myself in disorder. I am an artist. My aim is to craft my essence, allow my soul to project frustrations, my hate, my passions, my broken heart, my analysis of what I represent and feel onto my sound canvases. And for that I have to live life fully. Art is discipline.

Full Look: GmbH

SHAW: Is it more inspiring for you to dream of & reflect on the past, or do you garner more by following forward motion?

LOUCIFER: I dream constantly. I feel like a clock’s needle bouncing between left and right. I would rather live in a limbo between both illusions of time. I implement nostalgia in my tracks. I myself am often in need of that. But nostalgic fragments are always submerged by the novelty experienced during my creative process. I am a Past romanticizer who finds counterbalance in passion for endless wave-shapes of the future.

SHAW: What is tattooed upon your eyes?

LOUCIFER: Golpe Civil. A civilian coup d’état.

 

Jacket: No Faith Studios

 

A Momentary Surrender: An Interview Of Artist Zoe Chait On Her Solo Exhibition @ Ramiken In Brooklyn

Zoe Chait
projection reflected, 2017-2020
Projections on aluminum panels
9:18

text by Summer Bowie

Capturing Sophie, the late, hyperkinetic pop sensation whose tragic and untimely death shocked and saddened millions around the globe, is like photographing the flight of a butterfly. The prodigious and pioneering musician and producer of avant garde electronic music began her career anonymously making cosmic waves with singles like “Bigg” (2013) and “Lemonade” (2014), worked closely with a number of artists from the notorious PC Music label, and in 2017 came out as a trans woman. Developing an intimate connection with Sophie at such an inflection point was the genesis of Zoe Chait’s Noise, a solo exhibition of portraits that capture an individual who has just emerged from the cocoon with a new and fleeting lease on life. Here and gone in a flash, two artists forge a bond under painfully short exposure. A loving elegy, besotted with adoration. Chait bears witness to the weight of the sublime and the value of the present moment.

You have extensive documentation of Sophie working, creating, living life. When did you first meet Sophie and how did this show come about?

I first met Sophie at the Women's March in LA, right after Trump was sworn in, in January 2017. I remember, she was wearing this big, pink puffer jacket and glasses. She was quiet and her eyes had a curious gaze. We didn't speak much, but walked through the crowd together with another friend, silently processing.

We really came to know each other later that year, when we became neighbours. I rented a room in a very special compound where she lived and worked at the time. It was a wild and beautiful home in the hills. We became close and I began to photograph her. 

Mike [Egan], the founder of Ramiken, lived in the house as well while opening a gallery in LA. We shared a kitchen for many months and hiked the backroads of the canyon almost every morning. Over the years, we’d meet up when in the same city and reminisce about our times in that house. I would catch him up on my adventures living with different people and show him the photographs and films I was working on.  At the beginning of the pandemic he called to ask if I wanted to do a show and we eventually landed on a group of portraits of Sophie. 

What was it like collaborating with someone so intimately on a show like this?

With portraiture, no matter how close I am to the person in the photos or film, I’ve found it’s necessary for the subject to maintain distance from the final piece being created, especially during the edit.

No matter how real I want it to be or how honestly I want to portray the truth of a person, it ultimately becomes my experience of that person when I frame it.

Sophie was encouraging and understood the importance of letting go of the outcome. Her loyalty was to art, whatever it may be. I felt that from her in relation to this work. Even with the material so tied to her as a person, where naturally there could be self-consciousness and the instinct to edit, she supported what I wanted to do and appreciated the gravity of it. There was a lot of trust there, and I feel that how I saw her was one of the ways in which she wanted to be seen.

Can you talk about some of your inspirations?

Vulnerability is the most inspiring thing to me. Sometimes I feel we are living in a simulation of honesty and a performance of openness. When I’m able to witness a kind of raw truth in people and how they move through the world I want to follow that and learn from it. 

Can you talk about some of the mediums that you played around with for these images; is there any connection there to Sophie herself? 

Several of the images in the show are stills from video, for which the process of capturing the material is a different experience than the process of making the object. Sometimes the camera is very present in the interaction, and is a tool to go deeper, inviting the subject to share something that otherwise might remain interior. Other times watching through a frame requires a level of detachment with reality. I’m in an in-between state, physically there, but somewhat unnoticeable. I zoom into and meditate on micro vignettes playing out in a louder scene, searching for the intimacy I’d find in a private setting.

In the editing there is marinating and processing and translating the experience with materials that can come closer to representing the moment than a purely photographic documentation does. 

For example, Touch is made with a delicate, tissue-like organza stretched over a heavy iron frame, which sets its surface away from the wall, revealing its transparency. The feeling is of something I can never fully grasp: held by a strong, heavy support but in essence soft, fragile, fleeting, elusive.

I also printed on aluminum with dye sublimation, playing with the way different surfaces reflect or absorb light. All the choices are in connection to recreating the feeling of the given moment.

 
 

Do you remember Sophie’s coming out in 2018, because that was sort of a milestone moment?

In 2017, when “It’s Okay to Cry” came out we sat on her bed and cried, reading all the tweets of support, encouragement, virtual tears that had been looking for a release. I realized the impact of what she was making and how much the world needed it. 

What did you learn from Sophie over the years? 

She definitely taught me to push things to the edge and pursue what I believe in. Also, to constantly question the reality imposed by the structures outside, and instead listen deeply to what comes up inside; even if it’s soft and quiet, honor it, and live from there. Test the limits. 

In her passing, these lessons have become part of me and redirected me in some way.

Can you say what you learned about yourself?

In the process of grief I’ve felt overwhelmed by the concept of life itself. I’m reminded of how delicate and fragile it all is. It’s essential to honor the impulse we have to create, to be the way that makes us who we want to be, to live in love and to support in any way we can. 

Do you have a memory of Sophie that would describe her well?

I vividly remember a trip I took from my sister’s in Connecticut to visit Sophie at her Airbnb in New York for a few hours in 2018. We hardly spoke but everything was said. A momentary surrender. A new comfort in her body, nude beyond the skin. Breasts illuminated in soft afternoon light diffused by tall buildings. A lime green shirt with cherries on it, discarded on the floor along with a pack of Capri’s. A cigarette inside with Ben. Siblings holding hands. The case of the missing Juul, solved.

Noise is on view through July 24 @ Ramiken 154 Scott Avenue, Brooklyn

Designing Exit Strategies: An Interview with Composer and Musician Holly Herndon

photograph by Maria Louceiro

Many people are quick to label San Francisco based musician and composer Holly Herndon a “futuristic” artist, but the truth of the matter is that she may actually be more present than many other artists that are working in electronic music genre. Present in the sense of her intentions and her use of the tools of our time. It is the music of the future imagined ten or fifteen years ago when composers were still primitively discovering and harnessing the power that computers can offer in terms of the construction of music. Moreover, Herndon is coming to the electronic music genre with a scholarly background and a deep understanding about the processes of music – after leaving Tennessee for the Berlin club scene where she immersed herself in the sounds of that culture, she received her degree from Mills College in Oakland. She studied under the likes of John Bischoff, James Fei, Maggi Payne, and Fred Frith. This year, Herndon saw the release of Platorm on the 4AD label. It is her second official album and it is being lauded by critics across the board. Autre was lucky enough to catch up with Herndon for a convo – she discusses the state of club music, her early experiences as a choir girl growing up in the South, and her blurring of the line between academia and pop music. 

Joe McKee: Tell me about the new record. I’d like to get an idea of what’s evolved, what’s changed, what direction it’s gone—musically, thematically, lyrically.

Holly Herndon: It’s always weird to summarize your own music. But I would say that it makes sense on this trajectory that went from Movement to “Chorus” to where it is now. If you follow that trajectory, you’ll end up somewhere that makes sense for this new record. I think one of the biggest aesthetic changes is that it’s involved other people. Movement was me being a weirdo in a room with no windows. It was a very isolated exercise. Whereas this has been very collaborative, which has been really good and healthy.

JM: What brought you to that point? Was it purely that getting too insular was starting to drive you a little bit mad? Or was it that you were feeling you needed to shake things up creatively?

HH: There’s some of that. But there’s also some of the navel gazing-ness that comes with working insularly. That was bothering me, in general, about music—specifically dance music. I felt like there was a lot of inward-reflection, where right now in our world we need more outward-reflection. There’s been a lot of escapism in the club in the last several years. I think escapism has a place, but right now, what we need is people designing exit strategies instead of partaking in escapist hedonism.

JM: And finding solutions?

HH: Yes, but it’s not “solutions” as in “solutionism.” In the Bay Area, that’s a problem with tech. People are very solution-oriented. With tech, you can solve any problem. I think it’s great when people are problem-solving, don’t get me wrong. But there’s also a problem with solutionism as a whole, when you think that you can solve any problem. This leads me to [an] interesting thinker, Benedict Singleton. He talks about building a platform of new ways for people to communicate with each other. He’s a designer by practice, so a lot of that comes out of the fact that you can never design the perfect future. You can never foresee all of the ways in which the world is going to change. You’ll design for the perfect future, but then something will be invented that changes the game entirely. You have to start over. You have to think in an entirely different way. So instead of trying to design this perfect solution, it’s more important to design platforms to communicate in interesting, new ways. Then, it’s like a petri dish. People can come up with their own solutions to new problems as they arise.

JM: Can you give any examples?

HH: One example for that would be Twitter. It’s kind of a cheesy example, but Twitter was originally designed to be an internal communication messaging board for quick messages inside of a company. Now, it’s become a platform for all kinds of different things. It’s a platform for people to talk about race issues, anything. Twitter has become its own beast—there’s no longer that little, internal communication. It was never designed to be a platform for these specific things. But it was designed in a way for people to communicate. 

JM: Let me reign you in and ask, where does that come into play in the record and the collaborative element?

HH: I started thinking about how I felt that a lot of club world was navel-gazing, insular, and escapist. I started to ask, How can music be an agency? How can music be important, and invited to the table to talk about important things, not just escapism or entertainment? I started looking to people who are thinking about these same things, but maybe in a different discipline. That’s how I started working with Metahaven.

JM: Tell me a little bit about Metahaven. Have you collaborated with them again on this record?

HH: I’ve been working with them a lot throughout the past year. Mostly just epic, long email exchanges. We did the video, and we’re working on some other stuff. They designed the cover for the record. I was interested in them as a design collective because this is exactly how they’ve approached their practices over the past couple of years: They said, “We’re really good designers. We have a great aesthetic eye. But we also care about all these other things. How can we use design as a force for good, or a force to talk about other things that we care a lot about?” If you look into some of their work, you’ll see really good examples of what I’m talking about. Some of the books that they’ve published and some of the projects that they’ve done are very much aligned with what I’m talking about. That’s why I was so drawn to working with them.

JM:  I’m curious as to how you got to this point creatively. Your upbringing—everything that I’ve read, it seems to begin in Berlin. Forgive me for not digging that deep; I like to keep a little mystery. But prior to Berlin, how did you find yourself composing music, particularly on a laptop? Did it begin at a young age? Did you come from a music family? What instigated this long, complex, in-depth journey that you’ve had with composition?

HH: My earliest musical experiences were in the church. I was in the church choir. I was also in the school choir and the state choir. That’s where I learned how to read music. I also took guitar lessons at the church. I grew up in the South, so a lot of life outside of school is church-involved. But I also started making weird, cut-up radio shows—not a real radio show, but a recording on a cassette. I started doing that when I was really young with my best friend—fifth grade. Ten or eleven.  Really young—we were playing with dolls. We had this radio show, which was so insane—I don’t know why we came up with it. But now that I’m thinking back on it, it was probably a weird response to the neo-con radio stuff that we were exposed to. But we had this radio show called “Women’s Radio.” I did not grow up in a feminist situation. We would do fake interviews with Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton.

JM: That sounds quite advanced for a ten or eleven year old, I must say.

HH: We didn’t know what we were saying. Madeleine Albright was a serious thinker—we were not bringing her to light at all.

JM: I was climbing trees and bumping into things at that age, so its very impressive that you were doing those things.

HH: I seriously think if you listened to it now, you wouldn’t be impressed, [but] I started messing around with recording over stuff—in a super-simplified way. That’s my earliest memory of sampling.

JM: Bridging the gap between then and now, can you give me a little dot-point form of how you found yourself in Berlin in that club scene world? And then coming to a point of exploring the academic angle?

HH: When I was in East Tennessee, I knew that the local German teacher arranged exchange programs if you learned German. I really wanted to get out of East Tennessee and go to Berlin. This is before I knew what “Berlin” meant, naturally. I didn’t know it as an electronic music site or anything like that. I just knew that it was far, far away.

"I loved Tennessee, obviously. But at that age, it’s like, 'Get me the fuck out!' I learned German and did this exchange. Through that, I met a German guy, and I fell in love with him. He was a club kid, so I was initiated into that world. We broke up." 

JM: You wanted to get the hell out of Tennessee?

HH: I loved Tennessee, obviously. But at that age, it’s like, “Get me the fuck out!” I learned German and did this exchange. Through that, I met a German guy, and I fell in love with him. He was a club kid, so I was initiated into that world. We broke up.

JM: Do you feel like you got stuck in the club scene?

HH: It’s like anyone who explores music. I feel like people get really stuck on the club part, and that’s probably because it was the first thing that I did. But I was also involved in other scenes in Berlin. I was always going to new music concerts. I was never fully satisfied with one thing. I was always trying to check other things out.

JM: Then what did you do?

HH: Then, I wanted to formally study. I was always trying to make stuff myself, and it never really sounded the way I wanted it to sound. I applied to a program in Berlin and to Mills. I got into both programs, but I decided to go to Mills because it seemed like a better fit. Fortunately it was a really good fit. That’s when I got exposed to the more academic side. But Mills is a very unusual place for the academy. It’s super hippie, super laid-back. I wouldn’t have been able to go to a more traditional program. Mills is a pretty special place for that. And I had never considered doing a doctoral program. I had never even thought about it. But then, when I was at Mills, that was something people were talking about. I didn’t even realize it was an option. Then, I started to learn more about the DIY computer music history in the Bay Area. I learned about CCRMA [Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics] which is here in Palo Alto. It’s like a rabbit hole—you uncover one thing, then you uncover the next thing.

JM: It seems that the more you dig into the music composition, sound art world, everything seems to be under the cover of darkness. The more you dig, it’s incredible what’s revealed. I’ve been having chats with a few people of late, and I find it incredible. The support group, the size of this scene—it is really not exposed in a big way. It’s a massive undercurrent, internationally, which I’ve only learned about in the last few months.

HH: As part of my program, we teach. I was able to introduce new curriculum, which is awesome. So I’m able to teach my own class—the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music Post-1980. A lot of programs stop their pedagogy, the repertoire they cover in the 70s. The 60s and 70s was the heyday of electronic music, and no one wants to talk about the digital 80s. This musicologist PhD student and I designed this program together. Even though it doesn’t sound like a lot of time--1980-2015—it’s so hard to cover everything we care about. It was this huge timespan; we keep running out of time in all of our lectures. That’s the wonderful thing about music—you can always be learning about something new.   

JM: Now, maybe, more so than ever. It’s endless, the amount of music that’s being created and released. It’s impossible to keep up.

HH: It is impossible. But that’s one of the purposes of the class. It’s not about learning the history, necessarily. The history is important, but it’s not about having a photographic memory. It’s more about having the skills to be able to make an aesthetic judgment on something—why you like something, or why you don’t like something.

JM: That’s a very good point.

HH: When something is released after the students have come out of the class, I want them to be able to listen to it and make up their own minds. I want them to be able to argue why they think it is or is not good, to know its history.

JM: On a completely different note, can you tell me about your time learning with Fred Frith? I’m a fan of his work.

HH: Oh, that seems like ages ago! Fred is an awesome composition teacher. Stylistically, we’re very different. There are some composition professors who impose their sound on you. And then there are those really great ones who don’t impose their sound or even their aesthetic on you. Instead, they try to give you the tools to be able to better shape your own work, or think about your work in different ways. He was one of those in the latter category.

JM: I dare say there are some parallels between your work and his. Despite his being more acoustic-based, I can see parallels.

HH: Just the whole improv thing—that’s a huge deal at Mills. They have a program for improvisation. I wasn’t in that program, but it’s so small that people from different programs are all together. People were improvising all over the place. I was in his improvisation ensemble when I was there. I don’t improvise in the same way—I don’t do free improv now. But having that experience definitely has impacted my studio and performance practices.

JM: I’m curious how that affects your composition, too. Being from an academic background, your job is to dissect and intellectualize your work. Where do you draw the line between the cerebral and the visceral? Is there an element of chance in your compositions? I was speaking with Jonathan Bepler about this; improvisation is a huge part of his composition. How does that come into play when you’re dealing with things like computers and software?

HH: I think it depends on for whom I’m writing. If I’m writing for myself, a lot of it comes out of studio improvisation, setting up the system and then improvising with it. If I’m writing for someone else, I make a conscious decision on how much freedom I want the player to have within the composition. I wrote a soprano solo last year, and I gave her, basically, chords and rhythms to play with. But I gave her great flexibility as to how she wanted to order the. It totally depends on for whom I’m writing, what the point of the piece is, what the performer/composer dynamic is.

JM: But did you find—in the case of writing this record—that there were moments of chance and improvisation? 

HH: Of course! That’s what noodling around in the studio is, eventually. Its not always, and then I’m going to do this. It’s like, this part works, I’m going to try out this thing and see what it sounds like next to it or on top of it. That’s improvising, too. A lot of it is setting up a vocal or percussion system, letting it run, playing within it, and then picking out the good parts. A lot of the percussion parts are written that way.

JM: When you’re creating these on the laptop, in a fairly academic realm, you’re really blurring the lines between the worlds of academia, club music, electronic music, and pop music. What is the pull-push relationship there? Is there much thought that goes into it? Or is it a natural inclination to tie all of these worlds together?

HH: I think it’s something that I have been wanting to do for a long time but didn’t know how. I felt like that was a burden that I was placing on myself—and maybe the academy was, lightly, but not overtly. You can hear that in Movement. It’s almost like each track is in a different genre. It’s contained—this track is like this, this track is like that. That was still my brain separating things. I don’t want to feel like I want to do something for one context and something different for another context. But I feel like that’s imposed on me sometimes, too, because I can work in different scenarios. I’ve had festival organizers ask me to play their festival but not play any beats. That was really strange—why is there this divide? Especially when it’s considered a divide between a low-brow and high-brow thing. The album definitely has tracks that clearly belong somewhere. If you needed to categorize the tracks, they would clearly be in a different category than other tracks. But I think I’m getting better at blending all of my interests more seamlessly.

Click here to download Platform in multiple formats. Holly Herndon will also be making a number of appearances, including Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon on July 30 (buy tickets here). Visit her website for more tour dates.  Interview by Joe McKee. Intro text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram for updates: @AUTREMAGAZINE