At Temple Gate" immerses you in a kind of shamanism of which the echo has long since been lost. The modal ancestry and the power of electronic soundscapes in the album reveals a duality, an incantation at the threshold of death. The Sound is what immediately strikes the listener, even before the Logos, the word, the music itself: to listen to "at Temple Gate" is an experience a kind of sonic ritual.
It is not the dead, these deities, who are terrifying, but the living and their ever more ardent desires to communicate with those whose bodies have spread throughout the cosmos into a billion particles of stardust; where we come from and where we end up, ashes to dust. "At Temple Gate" is evocative of all of this: the bait of Time, Cruelty, the bite of Sound.
Seattle's composers Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang meet the percussionist and electroacoustic artist Hyeonhee Park for a unique distillation of experimental and traditional music. Jessika Kenney is a vocalist known for her haunting timbres and interpretation of vocal traditions, performing and recording with Gamelan Pacifica, Ostad Hossein Omoumi, and Sunn O)), as well as collaborating with poets Fatemeh Keshavarz, Red Pine, and Anne Carson ; Eyvind Kang is a violist and composer who has worked in the past with the likes of Sun City Girls , Bill Frisell , Secret Chiefs 3 , Blonde Redhead , Laurie Anderson, Christian Wolff, and many others. He has released albums on Tzadik (John Zorn) and Ipecac (Mike Patton) among other labels. As a duo, their orchestral and choral co-composition "Concealed Unity" has been performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra under Alexander Mickelthwate. They have released several albums on Ideologic Organ (Stephen O'Malley), including the Face of the Earth (2012), which was described as " serious, refined music " by the New York Times. Hyeonhee Park is a composer and percussionist who has studied traditional Korean percussion at Korea National University of Arts, in Seoul, and electroacoustic music composition and sound programming at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her pieces have been selected for performance at international conferences and festivals, ICMC|SMC 2014 (Greece), Composit New Music Festival 2014 (Italy), CCMC 2014 (Japan), SoundImageSound 10 (U.S).