Artemis Cracker

Les Horne (better known by his stage name, Artemis Cracker) began classical piano training at the age of 3, and by 5 he had won enough local and classical competitions to be publicly recognized as have more potential than the average young player. But after 4 years studying piano performance in college, and staring out at the prospect of a career in the bleak, uncreative and cut-throat world of classical performance, Les realized that a life spent reciting the musical and artistic statements of others would be a life wasted. And thus, Artemis Cracker was born.

Les grew up in the deep south of the United States, the oldest child of an unapologetic unreconstructed southern gentleman and his gentle lady bride. And no, he didn't go on to give them the proverbial finger and become just another emo tweed-wearing macbook-toting atheist singer-songwriter. On the contrary - from his early childhood, Les cultivated a passionate, fiery love affair with the deep south that continues to this day, and is unmistakeable to any perceptive person who hears his music. But he was born too late to see anything other than the ruins of southern culture that are quickly vanishing, the victim of a lost war and years of industrial rape and exploitation that turned her people from cultured, articulate gentlefolk into barbaric, racist, rebel rednecks, even as her monuments slipped into obscurity. And so Artemis Cracker's love affair is akin to the tortured affection one might have for a beautiful ghost: adoration tempered by the constant suffering of a lover who may never attain his true desire - and the dry, bloody stain of that suffering also leaves its unmistakeable mark on Artemis Cracker's music.

And there is yet another influence, which adds the final polish to the lens by which Artemis Cracker's music is best viewed, and that is the technological influence. Mixed with the southern-folk chord progressions dug straight from the plantation soil and classical piano flavor, inescapable after so many years of hammered refinement, are the complicated, synthetic sounds of electronica. One would think this a contradiction in an artist so deeply rooted in an agrarian heritage, but not so. The electronic influence completes the music, adding the modern influence and giving it perspective, for it (as the artist) may only look back upon its heritage, and never take part in it - this music, like the artist, is a resident of another age, and technology is an inseparable part of that age. So the resulting sound is something beautiful, and yet sometimes strange - tortured remembrance, screams of anguish which, filtered through time, sound beautiful and haunting - and while the music may occasionally surge as if with newfound strength for a quixotic sortie, it just as quickly falls back into brooding ambiance, sometimes hard and majestic, and sometimes peaceful and reflective.

Les today resides in Nashville, TN with his wife and son, and continues to record and locally perform. Artemis Cracker is expected to release a new album, “Things Revealed in Dreams,” in early 2012, and will maintain a busy performance schedule in Winter 2011-2012 and throughout 2012.