Ted Hearne makes music that refuses to comfort us. His new album, Farming, created with the choir The Crossing, exists in that exact moment when the pastoral dream reveals itself as a sales pitch. This is music wary of the narratives technology tells about itself, and suspicious of the smooth surfaces big tech uses to hide its seams. Hearne takes auto-tuned choirs and slams them against hyperpop’s frantic velocity. He splices 17th-century colonial letters with 21st-century CEO manifestos, and builds entire tracks around the existential dread lurking in a vending machine salad. What emerges is a soundworld that feels unnatural by design, where human voices get processed into alien textures before suddenly breaking through with startling rawness. Farming excavates something uncomfortable: the through-line connecting William Penn’s “benevolent” seizure of Lenape land to Jeff Bezos’s vision of frictionless commerce, the way both men dressed domination in the language of inevitability and progress. Farming doesn’t just critique these mythologies, it gets inside them, warps their DNA, and makes their contradictions audible.
Farming will be released on October 3 by Deathbomb Arc. Pre-order a copy HERE.
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What are your earliest memories of hearing music that made you want to compose? Was there a particular sound or piece that opened your ears to music’s possibilities?
I always loved the sound of many voices singing together. Something about the enormity or too-much-ness of a group really going for it (the Mississippi Mass Choir comes to mind), especially when you can hear they’re more invested in the intensity of the expression than someone’s idea of “good blend.” The times when I heard music like that — that’s probably the first thing that made me want to figure out how to make my own music.
When did you first realize that music could be a vehicle for social and political commentary?
In high school, some so-called “conscious” hip hop artists like Black Star (Mos Def/Talib Kweli) and The Roots were important to me. The political content of the lyrics is what attracted me at first, though it was the combination of sampling+lyrics that became the real gateway to my interest. Learning to hear how much meaning was embedded in the choice of samples and the arrangement of musical material, how that was the real message. And even if an artist’s lyrics did contain a direct political message of some kind, it was often the sampling that accompanied the lyrics that made the message most individual, or nuanced, or deep.
There’s something profoundly unsettling about the way technology promises to smooth our edges while simultaneously making us more fractured. How did this tension first reveal itself to you as musical material?
I think I disagree with the premise? Technology doesn’t promise anything, but sometimes, the people who wield it do. Technology doesn’t make us do anything (technology is glasses! technology is looms!); but sometimes, we allow it to be used against us, by the entities who control it. And they might twist the familiar narrative of “progress” to persuade us to give up our own agency, to submit to surveillance, conformity, and possibly (in the case of, say, Instagram), alienation.
It’s this cult of tech bros and technocrats — tech as a justification for corporate and governmental control — that inspired the music on Farming. Decoupling the “sound of technology” from the aesthetic narrative of the progressive corporate techno-state seemed like a good place to start, as it’s a project I associate with some of my favorite modern artists.
Maybe because we were just talking about Mos Def, I thought of his lyrics from the opening track on Black on Both Sides: “You got a lot of people trying to be God, wishing that they were God, They wanna create satellites and cameras everywhere and make you think they got the all-seeing eye; I guess The Last Poets weren’t too far off when they said some people have a god complex…”
Farming feels like it’s excavating something: layers of mythology we’ve built around progress, consumption, and the pastoral. What were you digging toward when you started this work?
I was struck when I learned that the original meaning of the verb “to farm” had no agricultural context, but rather defined the relationship of an owner to a lessee: rent, lease, or tenure. The “farming out” of labor — that’s the first usage of the word. So yes, Farming started as an excavation of this original meaning from its modern-day uses: the (sometimes disingenuous, sometimes ignorant) conflation of “farmer” (landowner) with “farmworker” (laborer); the relationship of colonial-era land theft to modern agricultural and labor practices; and a digging into the fantasies behind American agrarian nostalgia and the way it’s so easily co-opted to serve more consumption, more consolidation of corporate control.
You’re right that it’s an extremely layered mythology. I think that electronic music, with its sonic specificity, is uniquely suited to express and speak to layers of history.
There’s a track that asks, “What are greens, and how do they work?” This question is so basic that it becomes existentially terrifying. How do you transform the mundane into the uncanny through music?
Haha, yes. What are greens and how do they work? This existential question comes from the advertising copy of a company that markets small jars of food, ostensibly straight from a “farm” to vending machines in airports and other places with high-powered foot traffic. The text called out for ebullience and total frothy-mouthed evangelism, and I thought that creating a chaotic digicore track would help take us there. Just a super amped trashpile of sounds that drives forward in cheap hypercolor. Of course, the amazing vocalists of The Crossing unlock the uncanniness in this environment, as they are channeling a mix of G.F. Handel and John Tesh, and singing just ahead of the beat throughout.
Music can unlock whole new pathways of thought around ideas we thought were mundane. Every piece of music has the potential to hold such a complex sphere of associations and emotional/cultural resonances — playing with these, even in an unspecific or undirected way, by pairing music with historical or politicized text, is very exciting to me, and is the real engine behind Farming.
The auto-tuned choirs twisted into “unnatural harmonies” feel like you’re deliberately breaking the tools of technological perfection. What does it mean to make technology fail beautifully?
I think about the auto-tune in Farming this way: Every sound holds within it the history and context of its origin, and this includes the “technology” by which the sound is made. When technology is used in a way that deliberately departs from its intended or usual context, that use can point to the limitations of the technology… or of the story the technology was created to tell.
When you hear auto-tune but it’s the “wrong notes,” or when it’s set against a texture that makes it sonically unexpected, it may draw attention to the production itself — the desire to construct or amplify a “lead voice,” or maybe a misplaced “slickness.” And that might beg the question, who is the producer, and why have they not dialed in the auto-tune to achieve maximum comfort?
Your collaboration with The Crossing creates these moments where human voices become almost unrecognizably processed, then suddenly emerge with startling vulnerability. How do you navigate that threshold between enhancement and erasure?
The Crossing is an incredibly precise choir, and versatile in many ways, but no musician is versatile enough to erase or shapeshift away from their entire identity. The Crossing is embedded in a classical music tradition, and all the demographic realities of that background (the singers, the organization, the audience, the history of Classical choral music itself) are embedded in their sound — it has to be. So, if their contribution to this album was foregrounded the entire time, there wouldn’t be space for commentary or criticality about that tradition.
One of the most interesting questions to me when listening to a song: Is the singer a reliable narrator? And when the singer delivers lyrics, does the accompanying music believe them? Or are they speaking with a different voice somehow? Because Farming deals with American fantasy narratives — the commercial, the colonial — a lot of select enhancement and erasure of the “lead vocals,” not to mention warping, mangling, and obfuscating, is necessary, else those with the mic become too trustworthy.
You’re working with texts from William Penn to Jeff Bezos, spanning centuries of American mythology about land, ownership, and innovation. How do these voices speak to each other across time when filtered through your musical process?
Many of the lyrics in Farming are drawn from Penn’s letters to and about the Lenape (as he was in the process of seizing control of the land now known as Pennsylvania) and Bezos’s speeches justifying the expansion of Amazon. I thought they naturally spoke to each other — the presumed benevolence, the missionary-type fervor, the confident sense of inevitability, and the total lack of questioning around the idea that “ownership” (of land in Penn’s case, or labor in Bezos’s) is even possible, much less a good thing or something they’re entitled to.
Setting these words alongside specific samples is what sprouted the most interesting questions I had about this imagined conversation, whether the samples placed us in a quasi-revivalist religious vibe, or a Google commercial, or ’90s hip-hop from Philly, a SOPHIE-inspired digital fantasia, whatever. The positionality of different musical styles helped pierce the mythologies I’d accepted about these public figures, helped me both see their humanity and sharpen my criticism of their actions.
What does it mean to make music that’s “wary” rather than afraid? How do you maintain agency while acknowledging how deeply entangled we’ve become with systems designed to surveil and advertise to us?
Short answer: vigilance + independence + irreverence. Longer answer: Agency and acknowledgement need each other — our creative independence is built upon (and not really possible without) our grappling with our own entanglement in giant capitalist systems.
And how could it not be? At this point, every sound we make is either subject to, or deliberately shielded from, some corporate algorithm. And yet, we artists are under no obligation to allow our principles to be subsumed by/into these dominant systems of advertising and surveillance. (We cannot! We should not!) And because art has a unique power to reflect and co-opt everything it sees, it can render our dominant narratives absurd, and thus surmountable.
Settler colonialism operates through stories we tell about land, progress, and belonging. How does music become complicit in those mythologies, and how can it resist them?
Deep question. Music is just like us — a product of its circumstances. Our experiences are not the same as anyone else’s, and we cannot know what it is to be anyone but ourselves. Our music cannot know that either.
But, we can challenge the stories we were told about ourselves and others, we can continue to examine and refine our own behavior and ideologies in relationship to others. So can our music.
Certain harmonies and rhythms can be mined for their easy cultural or emotional associations; musical structure can model neutrality, order, and emotional catharsis; musical repetition (either literal repetition, or the sonic sameness of a consolidated commercial landscape) can lull us into utter passivity — all these are examples of ways that music serves dominant narratives, and ultimately reinforces latent assumptions. To resist, music needs to continue to question its own values, and continues to question the myth of the neutral perspective. Are you scrutinizing what you’re putting into the world or trusting the value systems of others? Are you trying something new or doing what you suspect will sell easily? Are you afraid of failure?
And lastly, as always, to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in this world?
A few off the top of my head: Pino Palladino’s electric bass on D’Angelo’s Voodoo; the satisfying crispiness of perfectly isolated frequencies in Ryoji Ikeda’s supercodex; the singing voice of my longtime friend and collaborator, Isaiah Robinson.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
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