FOXY DIGITALIS REVIEW

Mark Templeton “Inland”

Anticipate

Gently soaring drones, lifted higher with strong drums. Modified guitar chords interspersed with softened Aphex Twin twitches, and the wordless croons of Sigur Ros, the artist utilizing his voice as its own instrument to guide a song. Electro-acoustic ambient, fuzzy and warped, too warm to be called contemporary but without the faux-detachment of postmodern music. Quite beautiful at times, demanding your attention, each element somehow perfectly cohesive. The last track, “Beginnings,” is really the strongest, giving the listener a dreamy, rattling send-off. 9/10 – April Larson (7 October, 2009)

OMG REVIEW OF SEA POINT

Sea Point review on OMG Vinyl.

I had been feverishly waiting for Mark Templeton’s latest record, Inland, to come out on vinyl.  It never did, but this 12″ is definitely the next best thing.  “Sea Point” features three songs from Inland, plus three brand new ones.  Templeton plays beautiful, guitar-based ambient music.  It gets a bit glitchy in parts, and even has vocals sometimes, but it usually stays pretty squarely in the “drones n’ tones” category.  This was produced in a sparse edition of 300, and only costs $10.  Visit AnticipateRecordings.com.

33 DEGREES

Sill recent:

And another (in Dutch):

EXCLAIM!! REVIEW AND INTERVIEW

I’ve been meaning to post this, but just haven’t gotten around to it. I recently did a short interview w/ Eric Hill from Exclaim!

Mark Templeton Inland By Eric Hill Just a few months ago, Mark Templeton released the wonderful Acre Loss, a collaboration with video artist (and fellow Albertan) AA Munson that brought together sounds of the quotidian, nature and music into aural landscapes. On Inland, Templeton sticks mostly to the indoors and guitars, with occasional percussion, to create an equally expansive but more immediately musical work. Tracks develop from simple figures or drones, which are digitally manipulated, or melodic fragments that are recombined to form dreamlike approximations of songs. Album opener “At Your Feet” introduces both schemas quite nicely. “Oak” has bowed strings, masses of digital blips, like popping soap bubbles, and Templeton’s wordless vocals haunting the tree branches. His layered voice is key to the development of “Sleep in Front Of,” a track also notable for longish sections of untreated guitar and drums rather than the synaptic buzz of micro-edits Templeton tends to favour. Those jump-cuts dominate tracks like “Seam,” sizzling like an electric net set atop a swampy pond. Unlike pop, which has the power to recall distinct times and places, this music, with its omissions and overstrikes of melody, effectively creates new connections across time and place, and gets at the deeper meanings between them. There appears to be some tension between description and abstraction in your music. That is exactly what I am trying to accomplish: the balance between description and abstraction. If there is strong emotion throughout my music, images will come about naturally. I do not produce my works based on an image that I have seen or imagined. These images reveal themselves as the music triggers different emotions or memories. Is the rigorous editing your favourite part of making an album? It can be but at times, it tends to be a tedious exercise that is more exhausting than playing the guitar. Nonetheless, while editing I feel as though I stumble upon new ideas, ideas that otherwise would not have been discovered if I had not meticulously arranged the pieces. Has the move to Montreal had any impact on your creative process? Yes, most definitely. In the past, much of my inspiration came from a sense of isolation, as I was living in Northern Canada. Driving through the prairies, seeing open fields while travelling from one isolated town to another. While living in Montreal, the things that I am influenced by are more the people and the architecture — a different kind of landscape. (Anticipate)

TEXTURA/TELEPATHY

Textura.org just reviewed Acre Loss in January’s edition. Here’s what they had to say. Although it won’t be released until January 26th, you can preorder your copy today.

I recently received season 3 of the original Star Trek for Christmas. I’ve been watching 2 to 3 episodes a day. I often put it on while I fall asleep. I think the sounds have been affecting my subconscious and the music I’ve been creating.

SEE/VUE ARTICLES

Really enjoyed performing in Edmonton this past weekend. Thanks to all who came out. Here are some articles about the show:

Vue Weekly

SEE Magazine

TINY MIX TAPES

TINY MIX TAPES did a review of Standing on a Hummingbird. Here’s what they had to say:

Mark Templeton
Standing on a Hummingbird

[Anticipate; 2007]

—-
Styles: electro-acoustic
Others: Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Geoff Mullen
Links: Anticipate

Like many other people, I use the slow release schedule at the beginning of the year to catch up on records I might have missed during the previous one. Mark Templeton’s Standing on a Hummingbird wasn’t one of those, but I didn’t hear it enough to let it sink in. Had I given Hummingbird enough time, it would have surely been higher on my year-end list. It’s the kind of album that demands more attention than most; a few initial spins will net the obvious reactions, but only with the passage of time does it really begin to hit hard. This is because Templeton is working within a field that is becoming increasingly saturated with mediocre releases. A quick search on MySpace will reveal an astronomical number of artists who self-identify as being in the ’ambient’ genre. With so many artists operating within this framework of vaguely dreamy yet obtuse and somewhat difficult music, it requires a considerable amount of “active listening” in order to recognize the signifiers of another benchmark recording.

Make no mistake, Templeton comes from the same school of abstract electronic music that birthed outstanding albums like Fennesz’ Endless Summer and Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet. But much of what makes Standing on a Hummingbird shine is the way that Templeton processes primarily acoustic sources into something otherworldly. There are parts of “Amidst Things Uncontrolled” where the sound of children laughing slowly bubbles up from underneath a layer of static and glitch, and “Across From Golden” reveals its banjo melody in a more pronounced and naked manner than Fennesz or Hecker have ever done. The result is similar in nature to Geoff Mullen’s thrtysxtrllnmnfstns on Keith Fullerton Whitman’s Entschuldigen label. The major difference here being that Mullen was still working the kinks out of his process and some of the pieces didn’t seem as fully formed as what was to come on later works like The Air in Pieces and Armory Radio. Templeton, on the other hand, works his magic like a first-rate wizard here. Standing on a Hummingbird alternates fluidly between showing its passages of haunting acoustic guitar and disguising them in a field of glitchy static and discomforting drone.

Comparisons to Hecker are inevitable, though a specific personal connection has yet to reveal itself. The real difference between what Templeton is doing here and the work of his peers is in the details. Hecker’s music translates well at maximum volume, an exciting addendum to the canon of noise as well. Templeton’s work is equally dynamic, but instead of providing an acknowledgeable link to Merzbow through the use of the volume knob, it provides a light to expose the needles hiding in his haystack. Regardless of a few obvious touchstones, Templeton is doing great work and, along with Morgan Packard’s Airships Fill the Sky, is helping to establish an outstanding repertoire for the newly minted Anticipate Recordings label.

[Note to readers: Anticipate is giving away an excellent EP by Mark Templeton called Holden Into Ryley, available for download here.]

Joe Davenport