about the cd

Distorted Tourist is the visual, auditory, and textual travelogue of journeys through five manufactured and reclaimed landscapes. The book contains five one-sided flexi disc records with compositions corresponding to five apocryphal places.

Stemming from routine drives across industrial-commercial areas near the artist’s neighborhood, each photograph captures, mid-fall, the familiar and uncanny spaces of dislocated urban decay — monuments to the failures of modernity. Rather than attractions, the tourist here bears witness to the inevitability of moths and rust.

Each location is captured sonically in augmented field recordings, a soundtrack haunted by deceased materials and dying matter. Templeton’s signature compositional characteristics — faraway melodies, recurrent phrases, ruined echoes — evoke a cyclical trajectory toward Distorted Tourist’s center, the concentric spiral of a record, a voyage on misremembered roads into the middle.

Accompanying journal entries written by the author Ryan Diduck summon the hallucinatory diary of a Herzogian quest against reverse rotation. Photos and text appear to form and deform on the page. Together, the manuscript, sounds, and photographs represent an impossible portrayal, an audio-optical illusion, the roadmap to an eerie expedition that is at once unreal and urgent.

With audio mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and graphic design by Dmytro Nikolaienko, Distorted Tourist is an outstanding volume that gathers up Templeton’s adroit sound production, original eye, and curatorial cunning into a beautiful object to be puzzled over.