Christopher Tignor

“This music is first and foremost about what can be done together, live in a room, to both transcend and reclaim ourselves from the noise of public living. I’m waging a sort of secular, one-man liturgy here; a public act grounded in ritual. These songs offer wordless hymns and pulsing harmonic frameworks one might use to focus their own contemporary values. Instrumental music particularly offers the opportunity for personal interpretation and reflection. In this ever-fucked world, that seems perpetually in short supply.
“To engage with ritual is to engage with time. I needed to create a way to play solo that would let me wield the temporal freedom of expressive instrumental music with the full palette of modern electronic forces. I banned backing tracks, click tracks, and even live looping - anything that would enforce a strict grid. I wanted time back in electronic music.
“I also wanted the body back; our rituals begin with the physical. All sounds originate from me kicking a drum, playing the violin, or various natural percussion sources. I built software that lets me do all this, free here". This offers an unprecedented amount of control over this music’s elastic sense of time. Electronic music without the grid. There’s so much space in this music, it’s just essential - listening to a phrase decay in the room before proceeding. Likewise, there are no overdubs in these recordings; it’s just me, 6 mics, and 3 video cameras.
“Yes, the whole record’s also on video: a Video Album. We avoided the recording studio, preferring a spacious hall in what was once a psych ward and then a schoolhouse. Again, I’m trying to pull you into the live ritual, into the room. A video isn’t a live event but it does evoke it. I bring my own artifacts: triangles, a pasture bell, and tuning forks in particular: I use these as first order musical instruments, beginning with a percussive strike and then, while resonating, processed through my bridge into shifting melodies.
“So there’s a bunch of new stuff here. Real novelty isn’t an indication of quality but it does require a bit of bravery perhaps. We need to take chances.
“But enough about not-me. I’ve been creating instrumental music a long time now, under my own name and via bands (Slow Six, Wires Under Tension). I’ve also built software a long time - yes, I do this for Google. I did my time in Princeton’s PhD program for music composition, NYU’s Masters of computer science program, and at Bard studying creative writing. I worked live sound for years at NYC clubs now gone (CBGB’s, Brownies) while immersing myself in minimalism, working sound for a music festival produced by Mr. Glass and assisting LaMonte Young. As a string arranger I get to work with lots of great artists including John Congleton, This Will Destroy You, and Meshell Ndegeocello to name a few. I’ve worked as a bike messenger, snowboard instructor, and Emergency Medical Technician...buy me a whiskey and I’ll tell you the rest…”
– Christopher Tignor