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. Commissioned by 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.
