After a few years of finding the project's voice, in 2000,
Marc Bianchi released
Home Is Where You Hang Yourself, at that point the peak representation of his sadly dreamy indie electronic solo project
Her Space Holiday. The recordings
Bianchi was creating as
Her Space Holiday drew from the kind of bedroom electronics dabbling being explored by other groups in the indie scene in the late '90s like
Bowery Electric or
Land of the Loops, as well as the depressive and melodramatic songwriting style employed by friends like
Bright Eyes.
Home Is Where You Hang Yourself is where
Her Space Holiday locked its sound into place and where
Bianchi materialized some of his best songs. The album begins with its title track, a three-note guitar loop and exhausted, mumbly vocals building into a tiny symphony of bleary synths, sampled beats, and bluesy guitar touches. There's a muted euphoria to the song that bears some similarity to the narcotic orchestration of
Spiritualized, but
Her Space Holiday's take on the sound is a decidedly lo-fi reading. "Sleeping Pills" is delightfully down, with its defeated melodies and guitar chords riding on a laid-back drum loop, and "Snakecharmer" is an electronica collage, with backwards vocals and woozy synthesizers being interrupted by scattered breakbeats. The narrative song "The Doctor and the DJ" has a more straightforward indie rock arrangement, with layered, chiming guitars similar to those of slowcore band
Bedhead.
Home Is Where You Hang Yourself never goes too far in any stylistic direction, maintaining a focus on songwriting even when
Bianchi is wrapping his bummed-out tunes in ambient textures and found-sound samples. More than genre exploration,
Her Space Holiday uses contrasting sounds to create a beautifully glum emotional pastiche. The overriding sentiment on
Home Is Where You Hang Yourself is one of intense but beautiful isolation, with every beat, loop, and melancholic guitar figure all expressing the same lonely feelings. ~ Fred Thomas
