While admiring the cover of Holly Herndon’s new Movement LP recently, my coworker Amber pointed out that all the ambiguously cropped human musculature looked kind of like the opening sequence of Alain Resnais' 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, which shows two bodies—male and female—engaging in a kind of existential love/death dance, occasionally powdered in a substance that looks like nuclear ash or snow. I agreed, though this Mat Dryhurst-directed video for the title track, which "enters" the scene on the cover, certainly feels less romantic. It's pretty chilling to think of this sort of intimate pas de deux solely as the anatomical byproduct of muscles moving in space, but the well-oiled bodies and e-cig drags make the thought pretty unavoidable. It's kind of like the unsettling, gasping breaths at the opening of Herndon's album, which remind us that behind her ethereal singing, there's just a throat exhaling air. Learn more about her process from our GEN F profile, and grab a copy of Movement from RVNG Intl..
