Her Space Holiday, the brainchild of Marc Bianchi, adopted on
Audio Astronomy (Train Bridge, 1996) the style that
used to be called dream-pop before drum-machines and loops turned it into
microprocessed music.
Bianchi's progress is documented by the singles
Her Space Holiday (AudioInformationPhenomena),
Slide Guitars & Moving Cars (Clover) and
Wish List (Motorway), and by the
EPs Something Blue (Brave Noise)
and Silent Films (Dogprint).
The Astronauts Are Sleeping Volume 1 (Skylab Operations) and
The Astronauts Are Sleeping Volume 2 (No Karma, 1999),
collect compositions for guitar and synths recorded between 1996 and 1998.
Home Is Where You Hang Yourself (Tiger Style, 2000)
contains one CD of 10 new studio tracks and a CD of 8 remixes.
Bianchi planned to release eight Her Space Holiday records in one year.
This album marks a major breakthrough in Bianchi's quest for a postmodern
harmony. The simple sounds and techniques that make up Bianchi's arsenal
are assembled in complex architectures of music. Bianchi has reached the point
where where "lo-fi" turns into "hi-fi", roughly the way
Apples In Stereo did in pop music.
Bianchi found his true voice via
Codeine's and especially
Bedhead's "slocore",
Spiritualized's torpid shoegazing
Talk Talk's dilated synth-pop and
even relaxing, trance-oriented new age music, not to forget the experiments
on the song format conducted in the 1970s by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno.
Mostly, Bianchi simply tries to sing old-fashioned melodies and old-fashioned
stories with a mixture of grand gestures and soft touches
(Sugar Water, The Doctor And The DJ). Occasionally the add-ons
prevail and the song is warped into a spacetime singularity
(Snakecharmer). Often, Bianchi reaches back to the roots of folksinging,
with a more subdued tone (A Matter Of Trust, Famous To Me).
The second disc is snobby and impersonal as most remix affairs are.
Ambidextrous (Wichita, 2001) is the usual (tedious) album
of remixes.
On his way to coin a form of grand, symphonic pop, Bianchi
borrows ideas from Debussy, DeFalla, Stravinsky, Hindemith rather than, say,
Van Dyke Parks or Brian Wilson, to assemble the melodic tour de force of
Manic Expressive (Tiger Style, 2001).
While the project gets more and more intriguing, the fact remains that, at the
end of the day, one is hard pressed to remember any of the songs.
The mildly psychedelic Hassle Free Harmony and the baroque minuet of
Lydia stand out.
Bianchi exceeds in romanticism on The Young Machines (Mush, 2003),
an album that sounds either too ethereal or too wimpy. Even the best
songs (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend,
Sleepy California,
Something to Do with My Hands)
sound like Mariah Carey masquerading as Kraftwerk. It is not enough to drench
a melody into electronic sounds.
Marc Bianchi relies too much on his lyrics for the songs of
The Past Presents The Future (Wichita, 2005)
One has to like his stories to like his music.
His cinematic quality, particularly the way he arranges the sections of strings and woodwinds (Missed Medicine, The Weight of the World),
is wasted on these half-baked profound meditations (an oxymoron,
but the best way to describe the irritating tension that exudes from the album).
Bianchi aims for the symphonic poem, for the ambitious, spatious, epic use
of all musical means to deliver a complex message. Then why waste time with
pop songs?
The two EPs Let's Get Quiet vol 1 (2005) and Let's Get Quiet vol 2 (2007) sounded like inferior leftovers.
Xoxo Panda & The New Kid Revival (2008)
is full of fluff and devoid of new ideas.
Her Space Holiday (2011) was presented as the final album for
Her Space Holiday and it was also the worst of the entire repertory.
