Ted Hearne & The Crossing – Farming (Deathbomb Arc) – Monumental and mindblowing, this is a work that encompasses EVERYTHING. That’s the whole idea of maximalism: total assimilation of these maximalist times.

Like slowly boiled frogs, we are simmering in a stew of information way too hot and dense for any human brain to bear – and yet we’ve acclimatised ourselves to it.  Become addicted to the random boil. We’ve almost forgotten what it was like to be human twenty years ago. Though the info-stew is the most fundamental change in the history of the species (yes, it is, helloooo) it’s happened in an evolutionary eye blink.  Hello panopticon, hello crack-level addiction to a machine we hug to us day and night, hello a library’s worth of vintage science fiction DVDs/utopias and futurist tropes popping into existence.

Here we are: what sort of contemporary, popular, authentic art, music, can we make, while we’re still human and can try to comprehend it? Well, this.

The whole point of maximalism is seamlessness and total absorption and uninhibited response.  Everything everywhere all at once.  But not chaos: hunting patterns and meaning in a maelstrom life where we input and process terabytes of information from the moment we get up, scrolling the news, flicking past adverts, stopping only to devour delicious morsels of music and sound and art and story and craft and history from the entirety of human existence, before breakfast.  And now, 2025, with a daily serving of political insanity beyond the most cynical of dystopian comedy.  Hoping and praying it’s all a blip, that we’ll look back and go, wtf, that year. How did we cope?

This is why Farming has to be the album of the year, this year.

It is like the Time Out person of the year cover

Ted Hearn is a composer from America who creates complex, multi layered, emotional, dazzling works, usually combining (near) traditional band setup with contemporary choir The Crossing.  His work is wild, and also, listenable.  He experiments with structure more than melody: the melodies are strong enough to hook onto, no matter how broken up and unexpected the narrative. Commissioned by Grammy-award winning choral ensemble The Crossing, ‘Farming’ makes glorious use of the twenty-plus strong choir and solo voices: this is high end contemporary classical composition, John Adams-level composition with nods to Neil Ciceriga and Plunderphonics, via Messaien and Stravinsky’s Les Noces as performed by Dominque Leone.

The result is deeply, utterly, beguilingly and disturbingly zeitgeisty.  Gorgeous harmonies, richly Gospel hued phrases start and then glitch in organic real time, then glitch with a hint of autotune manipulation, then recite fragments of podcasts from Jeff Bezos, bright, cheerful snippits of coming totalitarian hypercapitalism.  This is web content and aesthetic: libretto reading from a Coronavirus advisory, the text from promotional emails and popups, from screen-readers, making America great, cut to a game soundtrack, Nyan Cat meme, fragments from Twitter posts, fragments drifting in a galactic void.  The dynamics of final track ‘We’re Actively Monitoring’ imitate the compulsive scrolling that has a hold on our lives, the bursts of frictionless information hitting our retina, mainlining into our thoughts. Yet, in between, there are pauses for breath where the real world and real emotions return – reminders that we are still real, that we yearn for something more, something wordless.

Does that sound like hard work? No – like doomscrolling, it’s harder to stop listening, easier to keep going even as your nervous system overloads. The colours are so rich, so bright and compelling: the sonics of ‘Farming’ lean towards the warm and alluring and the sharp, brilliant touches of hyperpop aesthetic are sprinkled sparingly.  Let’s remind ourselves this is a work by a human being – am I really writing this, are you really reading this? Yes, we have to say it, because it is 2025 – this is NOT machine made, AI made, despite the lean towards uncanny perfection.  (What a bad SF novel thing to have to say).

What brings Farming into the realm of great composition, truly great work, aside from the sheer harmonic quality and depth and effortlessly masterful arrangement,  is that that it’s about the human reaction to this overwhelming stimulus. Elisa Sutherland’s gorgeous, soulful solo on ‘Everything That We Do Well’ layers a speech from (I assume) Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with yearning, the space and atmospheres suggest contemplaing some kind of loss (of the High Street? Of privacy? Of the world we knew?).   It’s hard to say why, but it feels like the only sane response to… it all.

We do, truly, live in terrifying times. If you’re not actually scared, you’re probably already hacked.  It’s one thing to grow up in the grim 80s thinking about fallout shelters and four minute warnings, it’s another to wake up to find every single aspect of your life, down to the tiniest detail, logged in a data farm somewhere – whilst at the same time, the vast knowledge potential of the Internet we briefly enjoyed enshittifies away into oblivion.  Is it too idealist crazy to hope that music and art can help to wake us up into solutions?  The best sort does that – show the truth without crushing those who comprehend it.  The reality is that within all the tech, the hum of the data centres, there’s the flesh and blood of living, breathing humans, and humans can sing. (MO)

Bandcamp / Deathbomb Arc Shop / Deathbomb Arc / Farming / Deathbomb Linktree