grooves:

Standing on a Hummingbird is the debut full-length from Edmonton's Mark Templeton, and it also inaugurates the Anticipate label. Consisting exclusively of electro-acoustic experimentation utilizing stringed instruments (primarily banjo and acoustic guitar) and accordion as source material, the album both showcases the dynamic range of the instruments and demonstrates the widely varied manner by which the acoustic sources can be deconstructed and manipulated to create new sonic shapes and textures. The resulting majesty and melancholic intimacy of these ten tracks betray a background in musical theory, which suffuses Templeton's compositional technique with a decidedly postmodern flavor.

Templeton has a preternatural ability to isolate certain textural nuances of sound, stretching and re-shaping them as atmospheric works that reveal themselves gradually. Delicate guitar figures and arpeggiated chords decay into granular particles and re-assimilate as haunting, delicate fragments, each of which is part of a grander recombinant electronic soundscape. His manner is enhanced by the use of field recordings to augment these digital reconfigurations. The sound of fingers sliding along a guitar string, for instance, with the right amount of delay added, is layered atop a vague snatch of conversation and washes of fragile digital static to create a spare, microtonal track imbued with a staggering amount of emotional resonance.

The virtues of subtlety are manifest on Standing on a Hummingbird, as Templeton allows his pieces to unfold slowly without bombarding the listener with a needless cacophony of glitch and other electronic detritus. Far removed from the aseptic, mundane qualities that have begun to characterize the laptop-folk/electro-acoustic movement, this series of compositions is as inventive as it's abundant with sonorous tonal warmth.

April 2007