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Do you have listening prejudices? No? Good! Do you have a fair amount of recklessness? Yes? Great! Then go ahead and put "Standing on a Hummingbird" by the Canadian Mark Templeton, a very distinctive new guitarist, into your player.
The definition above is somewhat limiting, considering that acoustic guitar, banjo, and electric guitar for Mark Templeton are simply pretexts to draw faint melodies that are left to drift away without development: a sonic background made of minimal phrasing, often repeated in loop, garnished with field recordings (or ambient recordings: the sound of water, the traffic noise, people's chatter, etc.) and constantly tainted by extraneous noises, disturbances, ugliness, and distortions of all sorts.
First released in February 2007 by Anticipate, "Standing on a Hummingbird" keeps pace with the latest evolutions in electronic, electroacoustic, experimental ambient, glitch music, and so on. Christian Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi are two names that immediately come to mind to frame this newcomer within the stylistic current that seeks creative use of the (electric) guitar: an instrument well-traveled over decades but which now, in the case of these musicians, is in symbiosis with the laptop.
However, Mark Templeton's contribution lies in the excessive use of noise, which mercilessly pierces every single bit of this CD. One might even say every groove (if it were pressed on vinyl) because the Canadian, not satisfied with the storm of glitches with which he lashes the ten tracks of the album, even reproduces the scratch of a needle from bygone times... And where that still isn't enough, he shreds the musical phrasing, mistreats the sound material, compresses it, distorts it, overlaps it upon itself as in the broken and stammered speech of an aphasic.
Yet this work is listenable, and not without some emotion: congratulations to Mark Templeton, or how to disfigure sound.
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