Edmonton’s Mark Templeton has been creating ambient soundscapes for years, not only as leader of Fields Awake–which in turn includes members of well-known locals the Faunts–and as a member of the experimental country act Field and Stream, but also as a highly acclaimed solo artist.

Templeton, whose Standing On A Hummingbird will be released March 16th on New York-based label Anticipate, can lay claim to being Edmonton’s biggest and best-known name in the avant-garde electronica genre.

As with Templeton’s last release, the Frail As Breath EP, the upcoming album sees the musician exploring new sonic frontiers, using acoustic instruments amidst his electronically generated ambient dreamscapes.

"I guess the whole approach to song structure and melody in general is becoming a lot less traditional in a sense," Templeton says. "The album or studio approach is taking different acoustic instruments and then improvising over different chordal arrangements or melodic themes and bringing it into a program and editing them or processing them to obscure certain things that would initially be obvious. I used to steer away from that, but I’m at a place where I’m confident enough in my musical background to let that come through a bit more on Standing On A Hummingbird."

Templeton plans to apply this approach to his live performances as well. Following the album’s release, he’ll embark on a European tour with fellow Anticipate artists.

"I’m using a laptop and guitar," Templeton says about his stage show. "More of the performances lately have been entirely improv, with guitar being the main sound source. All the sound sources are real sounds, and allowing them to be shaped or molded into different, new, experimental sounds is exciting for somebody like me."

With its mid-20th century foundations in composers like Steve Reich and John Cage, the avant-garde electronica genre incorporates elements from almost any sound and style. In Templeton’s case, amidst his laptop-generated buzzes and tones is improvisation, commonplace in free jazz, the use of acoustic folk instruments, and dreamlike, evocative musical passages common in early-’90s shoegaze rock. With Standing On A Hummingbird and the supporting tour, Templeton aims to channel all these musical "schools" into one cohesive work.

"It’s been difficult to get a depth of sound live," Templeton confesses. "For me, there’s an acoustic element, and I’ve been trying to incorporate that type of thing in an electro-acoustic environment. In different forms of jazz, or classical, they’ve experimented with that. It comes down to artists using another voice, looking for something new, instead of sticking with the same traditional approach."