Alex Temple

My music lies somewhere between Surrealism and Pop Art. As someone who loves both the classical tradition and the world of pop culture, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with stylistic hierarchies and the idea of a pure musical language. I prefer to find the points of connection between things that aren’t supposed to belong together — often to uncomfortable or disquieting effect. In the past few years, I’ve come to see my work as a kind of cultural archaeology and myth-making. A lot of my recent music uses appropriated musical and textual materials to evoke clusters of associations — places, time periods, ideologies, worldviews — while distorting and recombining them in order to create new meanings. I’m particularly interested in stories of lost memories and secret histories.

I got my BA from Yale in 2005 and my MA from the University of Michigan in 2007. My teachers have included John Heiss, Matthew Suttor, Erik Santos, Robert X. Rodriguez and Jay Alan Yim. I’ve also released two albums of electronic music on my own microlabel, played keyboards in a handful of genre-bending bands, collaborated with choreographers and filmmakers, worked with young composers at the New York Youth Symphony, and put on solo voice-and-electronics shows at New York venues such as Galapagos Arts Space, the Gershwin Hotel, and the Tank. I’m currently studying with Hans Thomalla at Northwestern University and working on a piece for singer Mellissa Hughes and the American Composers Orchestra.