CHRISTOPHER TIGNOR: The Art of Surrender

Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, lecturer, and software engineer with a PhD in music composition from Princeton. In his early years, he was the personal assistant for LaMonte Young, and was the technical director for Music at the Anthology, a new music festival produced by Philip Glass. His emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electroacoustic practice has won acclaim within both the classical and experimental communities across 10 LPs on the Western Vinyl and New Albion record labels. He creates the live performance software he uses, shared freely. As a composer he has written and recorded work for ensembles including The Knights, A Far Cry string orchestra, and Brooklyn Rider string quartet, performing alongside them at premiere venues including Carnegie's Zankel Hall. As a string arranger he has worked with Helios, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, This Will Destroy You, Meshell Ndegeocello, and several other artists at the boundaries of popular music.

Tignor's new album The Art of Surrender (Western Vinyl), marks a return to life, sown from primal impulses and hard-won emotional truths. Unrestrained melodic rapture soars above a propulsive kick drum, speaking a need to move, to dance, to love.

The music is as ambitious as its origins are personal. Tignor plays with scale, crafting multi-movement epics alongside one-minute miniatures. The smallest, most fragile violin gestures, where the finger barely touches the string to extract natural harmonics exist side by side with angular, exotic melodies, asymmetric rhythms, and rapid-fire string crossings. On this album, Tignor digs even more deeply into the violin and its technicolor re-imaginings under his electroacoustic treatments.

Jeremy Young is a sonic artist and electroacoustic composer from Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, and a member of Sontag Shogun and Cloud Circuit among other projects. In 2021, Young released, Amaro, a solo LP built around electroacoustic compositions and improvisations using oscillators and tape, organized in duet performances with multidisciplinary artists Pauline Kim Harris (String Noise), Ida Toninato, Markus Floats, Dolphin Midwives, Deanna Radford, Johannes Bergmark, filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa, and the legendary Vito Ricci. In 2022, his latest release, August Tape Sketches, a collection of tape loop collage sketches for improvised solo guitar, was released by Belgium's famed Meakusma label. A collaborative record with Dutch sonic artist and classical guitarist Leonie Roessler entitled Distant, Intimate is due out on Royal Editions and Dead Definition on 12" / cassette in 2024.