“U Open Up A Window”: The Surrealist World of TEMPOREX

Photo Credit: Victoria Ortega

Inspired by artists such as Prince, Cocteau Twins, Paul McCartney and D’Angelo - TEMPOREX is the project of 21-year old Joseph Flores who explores the vibrant and whimsical connection between visual art and music. TEMPOREX’s style of music borders the genres of Alt-Pop, Electronic, Dream Pop, and many more. “U Open Up A Window”, Flores’ second single from his upcoming album Bowling, is a journey through his appreciation for all the people in his life who have inspired him, as this is something that he cherishes every day. TEMPOREX has created an amazing surrealist environment within his music, ultimately allowing the listener to indulge into a world of 90s nostalgic themes and dream-pop instrumentals.

[UNPUBLISHED]: When did you begin your musical project called TEMPOREX and how did you create the name?

[TEMPOREX]: I started the project sometime around 2015, and I had previously called myself Bike Factory because I thought it sounded like something Boards of Canada would come up with. That name was too pigeonholing for the way my music was evolving at the time so I thought I’d try adopting the name of a clothing brand I was working on at the time called Temporary Exports. I typed that into Photoshop really fast with my eyes closed and it came out as “temporay”... temporay was taken on Instagram so I tried TEMPOREX and it just stuck. I think the name’s connotation can take many forms and that’s why it fits so well.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Unfortunately due to the pandemic, you were unable to attend your tour with mxmtoon - how did this cancellation inspire your writing process?

 [TEMPOREX]: I think it was pretty bittersweet because the album was about halfway finished and I would have been a bit sad having to leave it unfinished for a while, but I was also really excited to play some stuff I’d been working on for a new group of people in order to test out the new tunes and see how the crowd would react. The pandemic gave me a bigger excuse to isolate myself and better my craft even though I had been isolating myself for quite some time even before the pandemic. I would have loved to tour at that time and I was so excited but the universe definitely had a different plan for me.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Your track “U Open Up A Window” speaks about opening new perspectives and opportunities in your life - could you describe the backstory behind the message of this song?

 [TEMPOREX]: There have been a lot of people in my life who have exposed me to new things I would have never thought to explore on my own, and this is me expressing my love and appreciation for them. The music and art I’ve been shown by these special people have stuck with me for years and years and continue to inspire me to this day. It’s just such a magical thing to me that those people will never have an idea of how much I adore them for the cool stuff they’ve introduced me to. They have helped me continue to grow so much and I think that’s kind of priceless. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: As the window in the "U Open Up A Window" visualizer pays homage to Pee-Wee's Playhouse - can listeners expect more underlying nostalgic themes from the unreleased tracks off of the LP Bowling?

 [TEMPOREX]: Yes! Absolutely. Between the release of Care and when I started Bowling, I had become obsessed with 90s video game ads. They’re probably the only examples of marketing that have actually been eye-catching and fun to look at in a while. The colors they used were amazing and they were kind of surreal in a way. Looking at a vintage Nintendo Power magazine cover or an old T.V. advertisement for Donkey Kong makes me feel nostalgic for a time I wasn’t alive for and I hope that listeners and viewers can experience the same feeling when watching and listening to this album.

[UNPUBLISHED]: I read that you used an AI technology to create the visuals for your “Delayed” music video, will the surrealist 3D environments continue in future visuals for the Bowling LP?

 [TEMPOREX]: Definitely! I love creating wonky worlds and surreal environments, and just things in general that are fun to look at. The AI technology I used only green-screened me out of the videos of me dancing in my room. All of the environments in the video were created and built by me in Blender. Although, there is some other cool visual AI technology out there right now that I might want to use on some future projects.

[UNPUBLISHED]: The visuals that you have created for your music are some of the coolest visuals that I have seen in a long time! Do you feel it’s important to have these dream-pop, surrealist visuals represent your sound?

 [TEMPOREX]: Thank you so much I’m so glad you like them! I think that it's fun to show the people who listen to my music what I picture in my head when I’m listening to my own songs. I think some people honestly might not be able to get my music sometimes, but when they see the artwork and video that comes along with it recontextualizes the song and gives them a whole new understanding of the song that they might not have had before. It also lets me, welcome people, into a world that I’ve created completely on my own and welcomes people to take a step into my imagination which I think helps fans understand me as a person in a whole new way.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Is there a song off of Bowling that best represents you as an artist in 2021?

 [TEMPOREX]: “Little Star” was the last song I wrote from start to finish for Bowling, and it’s still one of my favorites. I think lyrically it touches on a lot of issues I still face, and I think it’s one of a few other songs on the album that can probably help listeners understand me a little bit better. Production-wise the song features guitar fairly prominently. In the future I hope to use more guitar in my music, I think I still have a lot more to explore in that realm and I’m excited to learn more and expand on my current skills as a producer.

[UNPUBLISHED]: How have you evolved as an artist from your 2017 album Care? 

 [TEMPOREX]: Personally I think I’ve become a lot better of a writer, producer, and artist overall. I think my taste evolved quite a bit since the conception of that album and that enabled me to explore a lot of writing and production techniques that were new to me at the time. I also had to teach myself how to stop writing in any one specific style and to just make whatever I please. After learning this my passion grew and my motivation to keep working got a lot stronger. This meant no more cheesy childlike love songs to impress only one group of people and that I needed to dig deeper because I definitely have more complex emotions and situations to unpack and write about. Although there’s absolutely nothing wrong with cheesy love songs though, I’m a sucker for some mushy love ballads!

[UNPUBLISHED]: What's one thing you hope listeners take away from "U Open Up A Window"?

 [TEMPOREX]: I want listeners to have their own personal takeaways for all of my music. I want them to feel like they can feel whatever it is they want to feel when listening to any of my songs. If I enable someone to live in a memory from a while ago when listening to this song that would be a mission accomplished. But if I had to be more specific, I would hope that they would feel nostalgia and appreciation for the great people who have turned them onto something that they never grew out of, or something that completely rocked their world.

[UNPUBLISHED]: As you create mostly everything yourself from the album artwork, the songwriting, the visuals, and the production - do you feel as though you have found an identity for TEMPOREX?

 [TEMPOREX]: TEMPOREX will probably never have its own identity. I want it to be a project that continues to evolve over time. It makes it fun and interesting to me to have to come up with new ideas and to have to continue exploring music and visual art in order to keep my own art fresh. I think I’ve found a more solid identity in myself than TEMPOREX if that makes sense. It’s clear to me that I’m an artist and that my taste can’t be stagnant or else I will never make something better than the thing I made yesterday, and that I can’t make good art without making some terrible stuff in between. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: Was there a track off of Bowling that was the most difficult to produce?

 [TEMPOREX]: “U Open Up a Window”, without a doubt. It was the last song that I finished for the album and I had started it 3 months before quarantine and finally finished it on October 20th, 2020, which also happened to be my birthday. I was telling Adam Thein, who mixed the album and assisted on a few other tracks, that I might be shelving the song altogether so that I can just put the album out already, even though it was one of our favorite songs. It was coming to a point where the song was holding the rest of the music back and I couldn’t take it anymore. I was writing and finishing new songs faster than I could finish this one. I wrote “Little Star” to replace it as an album closer, but then one day something just clicked and I was finally able to finish it. I was so happy that I scream-cried when I finally listened to the finished full version with my mom.

[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could perform alongside any artist, dead or alive, who would it be?

 [TEMPOREX]: I think it would be disrespectful to put me on the same stage as Prince since he’s such an amazing performer and so is everybody else I love, but I think it would be funny to see me playing the shaker in the background while Harry Styles is performing. Nobody would know who I was and it’s not really an instrument that someone could roast you for being bad at. It would just be funny for me and the people who listen to my music.

You can listen to TEMPOREX’s newest single “U Open Up A Window” here!