Browse by Artist: TEMPLETON, MARK

Artist:	TEMPLETON, MARK
Title:	Standing On A Hummingbird
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 001CD

"Mark Templeton's first solo full-length album, and is a fitting beginning for the Anticipate label. Templeton takes various acoustic instruments, most notably guitar, accordion and banjo, and manages to retain their inherent qualities and familiarity, while obscuring their character through digital manipulation and layers of textured static and field recordings. The result is an achingly beautiful set of musings, running through tonal ambience and warm, sweeping electro-acoustics, moments which are abstract and yet hold very concrete emotional motifs, as suggested by the title; a tension between natural fragility, its material fleetingness and the potentialities in its forward gaze, that space in between an understanding and acceptance of reality coupled with a yearning for certain impossibilities. Compositions unravel in linear fashion, straying from flittering granularized shards into clean acoustic progressions with ease, burying and exposing melodies, fraying and outlining edges along the way. Templeton begins each song with delicately strummed chord progressions and improvisations, and then takes them apart, constantly editing and processing until that glimmer shines through, that instant that resonates with him and hints at the song to come, the hope of what the piece can turn into. The final result arrives when the music coincides with the temporal goal, when the sound and the hope of what that sound could be, fall into place together. Templeton himself says it best: 'A piece will often be rewritten numerous times until it begins to take shape. It's often an unintentional note that I overlooked or the whirr of a mini-disc or background noise that comes to the forefront. All the desirable sound is there. It's just a matter of arranging it in the right order.'"

Artist:	TEMPLETON, MARK
Title:	Inland
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 007CD

This is the second full-length release by Canadian experimental electronic artist, Mark Templeton. The follow-up to 2007's acclaimed Standing On A Hummingbird (ANTICIP 001CD), Inland continues his humble electro-acoustic balancing act, using stringed instruments, drums, field recordings and his own voice with sensitive, effective processing, while playing with stillness and rhythm, visible, warm melodies and smeared, distorted meanderings. One hears the clear plucking of the guitar and banjo at times, and at others, a thick wall of texture. Beginning work in geographically-remote Edmonton, Alberta, Templeton continued and eventually finished the material after moving to the urban center of Montreal, which, in the usual paradox of urban centers, imposed the solitary remoteness of being away from friends and family while crowded in an isolating environment. The placement is still outdoors, but with a sense of borders rather than an endless plain. Working within these confines has yielded Templeton's most abundant work to date, a modern experimental campfire music which retains a subtle folkiness while acknowledging that this campout is only a five-minute ride from the comforts and technology of the big city and its big machines. Templeton makes extensive use of his voice as a melodic sound source, never uttering a word, but using the human sound as a layer which pulls you in and makes the most of its inherent gravity. Just as the voice sings out and is then quickly distanced and obscured, the song-like-structure of these pieces takes shape and then dissipates, leaving the shadows of guitar, banjo, voice, percussion and field recording elements. Since his solo debut, Templeton has developed a more fully-realized version of his sound, bathing it in a similar haze, but in a less handled, edited manner. By stepping back just a bit, and giving the sounds some more air, he has forged a stronger identity and found a place on a tightrope between electronic processing, folk-ambient music and an instrumental practice which doesn't sacrifice anything.

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