The "Like Dandelion Dust" Shortlist

Remember when we came so close to winning that festival slot in a Stereofame competition, only to be disqualified for being outside the USA? Well, we weren't going to make that mistake again. But things were still going to take an unexpected turn...

Stereofame's latest competition is to have a song on the soundtrack of a new Hollywood movie, starring Oscar winner Mira Sorvino. The top 10 bands as voted by fans would go into a shortlist from which film producers would choose the final winner. This time we checked the rules carefully, and seeing that, once more, only American bands were eligible, we didn't pay much attention. We even told a few people to vote for other bands.

And you know what? We were one of the winning bands anyway! Not only did we make it into the top 10 shortlist, the site actually retrospectively changed the rules to allow foreign acts, due to overwhelming demand:

"Although the contest was designed specifically for artists in the USA, Stereofame members overwhelmingly voted for additional artists from around the world who placed in the top 10. Additionally, Stereofame is quickly becoming a world music destination vs. a USA exclusive destination with over 50 artists from non-US countries. Therefore, we will also include these artists, as well as the top 10 US artists, to the production company."

So we're in the shortlist, which has been expanded to include five acts from outside the USA. We've no idea if our music will fit what the film producers are looking for, but we'd just like to thank all the people who voted for us - especially the ones we told not to!

Is This The Life - Gloworld Remix

We're proud to say that Alex Gloworld, one of our very favourite artists from thesixtyone, has done a stunning remix of Is This The Life. He's reinterpreted the song as a bubbling, brooding trip hop number with an ethereal, epic quality that makes a perfect foil to the original. You can hear it on Alex's page here, where there is also a download link (but we'll have a higher quality MP3 to download here soon, too - sign up to the mailing list and we'll let you know).

Thanks to Alex for an amazing job, and we look forward to working with him again in the future!

The original version of Is This The Life is available from iTunes and all the major download stores.

Download 'First Day' For Free!

20 June 2008 - Generous souls that we are, we've added a new song called First Day to our collection of free tracks. So along with The Story and Holding Back The Tide, that makes three free songs! Feel free to put them on mix tapes, give them to friends and add them to your blog.

You can download First Day for free, here.

Hear our new song - only on thesixtyone

14 June 2008 - We've uploaded a brand new song called Ordinary People to thesixtyone. For the time being, that's the only place you can hear it. It's now our second song in a row to break 1000 points over there - in fact, at the time of writing it's already over 1300. Click here to have a listen. Enjoy!

Changes? It looks the same to me... :-)

13 June 2008 - Remember when we promised that the last site redesign was going to be the last for a while? Well, technically we haven't broken our promise. We never said how long a while was :-)

In fact, even this design is only temporary. We've moved our site over to Blogger because we wanted something that makes it much easier for us to update the site and keep you all informed, as well as having better facilities for you to participate and comment. Far better than a largely static site. 

But we don't plan on keeping it here for long. Our ultimate aim (if you're geeky enough to care) is to host the site on Wordpress, which will give us loads more flexibility with the layout, and enable us to put much more cool stuff on the site to keep you entertained. Unfortunately, we have to work out how to use it first, so it could be a while! 

So be prepared for some weird and wonderful changes - but at least we're always in the same place, so you can keep www.templescene.com bookmarked in your browser.

We Win! (er... not quite.)

12 June 2008 - We entered a competition on Stereofame last week to win $2000 and a gig in New York, and came pretty close to winning. The idea was that the three acts with the most votes would be put forward to the organisers of the After The Jump festival, who would pick an ultimate winner. Well, despite the fact that we didn't even get around to asking anyone to vote for us, somehow we made it into the hallowed top three.

There we were, picking out the champagne, working out if the exchange rate made cool but unnecessary gadgets cheaper in America, and starting to mildly panic about organising our set, when we saw a little asterisk next to our name on the final shortlist. Temple Scene, apparently, do not meet the eligibility requirements - that is to say, we are not residents of the U.S.A.

Oh well. At least you can still vote for us on OurStage. We've got a whole bunch of songs in competition, although you can't vote for them directly - the site picks random pairs of songs and you have to decide which one you like better. Give it a try - you might just help us out, or even discover some other great artists!

Innocence breaks 1000 at thesixtyone!

27 May 2008 - We’re still reeling from the response to Innocence on our favourite music discovery site, thesixtyone. It took just 2 days to become our most successful track ever. Just as we uploaded the track, Somewhere In This City was revived back to the front page by listener KosmikRay, creating a frenzy of activity which ended up with Innocence being the most commented ever song on the site! At the time of writing it has well over 1000 ‘bumps’, putting it firmly in the top 100 tracks ever uploaded to the site, which of course includes bands with huge marketing budgets!

Thanks so much to everyone on thesixtyone who bumped it and left such fantastic comments. And if you haven’t checked out thesixtyone yet, we suggest you do!

Innocence is the second track on our new EP, Sektor, available now on iTunes.

Update, 11 June: it didn't stop there! Innocence it now at well over 1700 bumps, making it one of the most popular songs on thesixtyone.