That doesn’t mean dynamism is absent, though. From the start, Platform draws drama out of changes in speed and texture and many little parts that work together to make a sort of musical machine. Not music by a machine or for a machine ­— it’s music as a machine itself, with working orders and operating procedures that make for different kinds of effects. Some of those effects prove surprisingly human in the end.

“Interference” opens with a stuttering, strobing display of many of the techno-minded sounds enlisted throughout; the track has a gentle sense of propulsion suited less for a dance club than a movie scene in which a forlorn protagonist drives down a highway at night. “Chorus” is more rhythmically fitful, with slow, foreboding parts that launch into fleet beats for brief spells at a time. “Unequal” swerves from there, its operatic voices sounding more like avant-garde classical music than anything else.

“Morning Sun” marks another in a series of drastic changes, with a bright rising call to action (“wake up, wake up,” it whispers repeatedly) before “Locker Leak” presents more voices declaiming loud and clear. What they’re declaiming is hard to discern, exactly — among the utterances: “Who lasts? Glass lasts” and “Be the first of your friends to like Greek yogurt this summer” — but the effect is one of an alien life force trying to figure out how to emulate a state of personhood, like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under The Skin. By the end of Platform, it proves convincing enough to cast Herndon as a musician with more to say than her abstraction suggests at the start.

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