Search - Her Space Holiday :: Home Is Where You Hang Yourself

Although the breathtaking maturity and sonic scope of Home Is Where You Hang Yourself may lead listeners to believe otherwise, Her Space Holiday is actually just one musician, Mark Bianchi, who has been toiling away in San Mateo, California, creating minimalist pop gems with sparsely layered, beautifully fragile guitar parts. Supposedly, Bianchi, after years of frustration from playing in bands, decided to start recording alone when he stumbled upon a four-track. Bianchi's proficiency with multitracking is manifest in the ingenious way he lays simple guitar parts upon each other, the way he double tracks his own vocal harmonies, and the way he splices in seemingly incongruent drum samples and keyboards to create one gracefully unified effect. Home Is Where You Hang Yourself is made up of two discs, the first focusing on Bianchi's distinct pop songs and the second featuring Bianchi's own mixes using other artists' songs, including several artists who appear on Bianchi's own label, Audio Information Phenomena Records. On the first disc, Bianchi's influences are evident, if not obvious, from the Beck-ish feel of "The Doctor and the DJ" to the lazy front-porch guitar sound of Radar Bros. on "A Matter of Trust" to the sparse economy and dynamics of Yo La Tengo on "Snakecharmer" and "Can You Blame Me". Its clear, however, that for all these similarities, Bianchi is on to something that he can honestly call his own. He seems to have stumbled upon his own sound on his lonesome, cut off from the mainstream, like a mad scientist in a remote laboratory creating new life forms by splicing divergent genes or a kid blowing up preconceived pop notions with his chemistry set. The second disc of remixes is not nearly as compelling as Bianchi's original songs (for starters, Bianchi's guitars are nowhere to be found), but it is interesting to hear the inventive ways he tweaks these tunes. Besides, the first disc alone is worth the price of admission. --Paul Ducey