PRESS
//Reviews
"Behind the Wallpaper was a staggering achievement in 2015, when Temple wrote it for Los Angeles-based avant-pop vocalist Julia Holter and Chicago’s Spektral Quartet. But on the long-awaited studio recording, released this month by New Amsterdam, the piece is transcendent."
Hannah Edgar (Chicago Reader) on Behind the Wallpaper, 2023
"As its title suggests, Tactile has to do with, in Temple's words, 'the erotics of everyday life,' and intense interpersonal moments of a perhaps sexual kind. The intimacy of the composition is intimated by the whispered text ... Playfulness emerges in the way the instrument replicates the voice pattern and in the bold flourishes with which Gookin elaborates on the text in the margins."
Textura on Tactile, 2022
"The evening ended with Ms. Temple’s brilliant and zany Three Principles of Noir, a kind of cabaret cantata about a historian who decides to travel back in time to kill the great-great-grandmother of a rival scholar who has stolen her research. (The plan goes awry.) ... Ms. Temple’s music zooms across time, blending Prohibition-era cheek with recorded electronics that evoke mid-20th-century sci-fi."
Corinne da Fonseca-Wilhelm (The New York Times) on Three Principles of Noir, 2018
"The title alone speaks volumes on what this tribute to Frank Zappa contains. It’s a witty collage of quotations barreling through a train of thought that could exist equally in Zappa or Temple's heads, and spills out in jazz improvisation and big band bellows and words spoken by the performers assuming characters almost but not quite themselves. The performers have entirely too much fun, and it afflicts the audience delightfully."
Elizabeth Hambleton (New Classic LA) on The Man Who Hated Everything, 2015
"The songs were atmospheric with ambiguous tonality, drawing chuckles along with hushed curiosity. They quivered, hovered, paused and slipped in and out of ghostly waltzes before the last one, 'Spires,' resolved into the sweet major chords of an old movie score’s happy ending."
Jon Pareles (The New York Times) on Behind the Wallpaper, 2015
"A surreal takeoff on love songs of the forties and fifties. It begins with lushly orchestrated vocal kitsch … and then disintegrates into nightmarish fragments, with the singer (the riveting Mellissa Hughes) muttering about 'dark unending corridors.' It's like a Buñuel film in miniature, and it achieves perfection."
Alex Ross (The New Yorker) on Liebeslied, 2011
//Interviews
"It’s also a blockage of speech, it’s a replacement of speech with something physical rather than sonic. You could interpret that in a few ways. Either it’s a kind of censoring, or the fishes are speech. Or they’re something more primal than speech, they’re like a cry of distress."
Interview with Sandow Sinai (Hypocrite Reader), 2021
"I love cuteness, I love cuteness as an artistic phenomenon. I think it has the power to be disarming ... I want to do it in a way that has fangs, but, you know, adorable fangs."
Interview with brin solomon (VAN Magazine), 2018
"He sent me a bunch of stuff, and they were mostly abstract '60s and '70s films. I can enjoy that, but they didn’t seem to go with my music because they were very abstruse and removed from any sort of pop culture. Then I saw 'Uzi’s Party,' and I was like, This has gotta be the thing. It has queer moments, it has some humor, it has a narrative, it’s kind of spooky, and it’s about women."
Interview with Hannah Edgar (Chicago Magazine), 2020
"That must have seemed pretty plausible at that point in history. Instead we got Reagan, yuppies and privatization. That’s not as bad as a tyrannical dictatorship that commits mass murder and burns a third of the country to the ground, which is what happens in Switch, but it’s still a far cry from peace, love and understanding."
Interview with Cadillac Moon Ensemble, 2013