Ted Hearne, The Crossing, & Donald Nally - Farming [LP]

With his new album Farming (out this fall via Deathbomb Arc), Ted Hearne — the composer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by Pitchfork for creating “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory” — confronts technology’s ominous encroachment upon humanity’s very being. Created in collaboration with the GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, Farming tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism and its philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community.

Hearne dives headfirst into the Uncanny Valley, conjuring a soundworld fraught with neck-breaking shifts and stylistic contradictions. Its unholy marriage of ersatz Americana, digitally altered choral arrangements, and hyperpop’s synapse-frying maximalism inverts technology’s smoothing impulses in favor of an unwieldy, knotty expression of modern ennui and alienation.

Upon its 2023 live performance debut, The New York Times called Farming “a suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship.” It’s certainly intellectually audacious: In repurposing primary texts from William Penn and Jeff Bezos, Farming contends with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy’s unfeeling entropies — and reveals the ethical void at their core.