Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love

Waking dream

Mark Templeton creates mesmerizing and poetic multimedia installation with Fields Awake

Over sunrise and cloud forms, light through passing trees, prairie horizons and scenes so still you almost miss the motion, guitar themes ring and curve with piano and accordion. Strange sounds and snatches of human voice drift in and out, speaking of life and death and Belief. It’s hypnotic, loose and layered, the kind of thing you lose time in. This is Mark Templeton’s audiovisual installation Fields Awake.

“The audio is the film, and the film is the score,” says Templeton over a pint and a basket of nasty poutine. At 28 years old, a veteran musician playing with Field & Stream and others, as well as producing solo avant-garde electronic work (he recently released his first EP, Frail As Breath) Templeton describes the three-year Fields Awake project as a kind of imperative:

“I basically had a number of themes,” he says, “and I wanted to do something with them; I needed to see them surface. Fields Awake is something that needs to be released so I can move on.
“I started collaborating with Tim and Steven Battke from the Faunts,” he continues, “incorporated them, incorporated my friend Jeremy Putz on accordion and piano. I had written out a lot of the parts, and then I gave them to the other musicians. Some are note for note, others I said, ‘this is what I’m going for, can you play something along this line?’ I was leading it from the guitar and they were following me.

“I’d started listening to a number of Montreal musicians about four or five years ago, where people are playing, like, three chords and there’s no vocal line on top,” he continues. “They’re playing the most basic triads over and over, and that is the starting block of the composition. I heard that for the first time, and it just resonated with me; I was, like, ‘this can happen?’ I heard this and it was exactly what I wanted to do. Music without relying on vocals, without relying on verse and chorus, and going from there, incorporating field recordings, recorded thoughts.”

It’s these recordings that provide the music of Fields Awake with such literal content as it has, a sketch of people’s search for the divine. “I had questions I wanted to ask people, about how they relate to things that are spiritual, questions considering the existence of a higher being,” Templeton says. “I wanted to ask people that were not necessarily from the North American culture, and also people that weren’t looking at things through certain filters. I needed to ask people like the lady in Ypres, in Belgium, where the Germans used the gas attack for the first time in World War One. This lady was a tour guide through WWI cemeteries, and I wanted to hear what she had to say about the possibility of a higher being—God, whatever you want to call it—when she sees this every day. I wanted to hear what her perceptions of life were. As well, people like my grandfather. When he was dying of cancer, I had an opportunity to record him, and it was just very, very real; it wasn’t something that I was singing about or talking about and trying to convey. It was actually happening, and I got to capture it in all its circumstances.”

The third aspect of Fields Awake, the visual score accompanying the audio film, came later. “Initially, it was the guitar themes and the field recordings,” Templeton remembers. “Then my friend Jeremy said, ‘You should have a visual element. It seems to be calling for it.’ There was a filmmaker he introduced me to called Sean Corbett, who attended the Vancouver Film School and worked in Edmonton for a short time, and I brought him in and showed him the themes and immediately he showed me Herzog, the German filmmaker, some of his work; Goddard... right away he captured what I wanted to see.”

It was after an opening night performance at the Visualeyez performance art festival and another show at NextFest that the idea to present Fields Awake as a gallery installation came about. “Up until that point,” Templeton says, “the main idea of Fields Awake was to do this piece, perform it once in a theatre, live, with the film, and that was it. So, three years of work for one night of glory. And I was okay with that. I mean, it was a side-project for everyone, including myself. But when they said, ‘Why don’t you do an installation at Latitude?’ it was like a burden had been lifted.”

The installation itself comprises of two rooms, one with the 50-minute piece projected and looping and the other featuring the 32 limited-edition packages—seven-inch record sleeves with each cover a different still from the film, containing both CD and DVD—plus the rest of the limited 470-copy run hanging on the walls, along with monitors displaying the DVD’s menu and biography content.

“This is not a live performance,” says Templeton. “But it is an installation of the piece, a piece of art happening but once. It fits the piece,; it makes the most logical sense. It’s perfect.” V

Fields Awake
By Mark Templeton • Latitude 53 • Nov 17-26

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