Portlandia house bastion Ecstasy termed Temples' 2012 debut mini-LP I-VII "ambient jack," which captures something of the project's contradictory strengths: airy yet agile, sparse but plush, flights of intuition mapped onto morphing grids of percussion, crystalline electronics, and pastel skylines. Avalon Kalin's latest collection of tech finery, Earrings II, dials back the atmospheric quotient somewhat, though there's still a rock-garden spaciousness to his mixes, each element arranged with regard to some higher harmony, the poetry of negative space. Recorded in his home studio "while dancing," the four tracks here flow between passages of pressure and release, euphoric but unstable, dusted with pyramid-chamber slap back and live dubbing acrobatics. Their melting clock asymmetries more closely echo Kalin's hardware improvisations with Scott Goodwin as Polonaise than the velvet vocal house of his other solo vessel, Finesse, but Temples is ultimately a holy place all its own. A sleekly compelling statement from one of the Pacific Northwest's secret heroes.
