FARMING [2LP]

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 it's 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. It's 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 it's 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.