Christopher Tignor - Core Memory Unwound

For years Slow Six band-leader, composer, and software designer Christopher Tignor has performed with his signature software instruments alongside fellow band members, sampling and transforming their live performances in accordance with his meticulous, emotionally-charged scores.  On Core Memory Unwound, his debut under his given name, he brings his software to the forefront alongside some of his most intimate compositions for violin and piano.  A record dealing with memory, both metaphorically and literally, these intimate tone poems for violin and piano are each presented in two forms, once in their original acoustic state, and then as a "memory portrait" through Tingor's live performances on his signature software instruments, creating new works from samples of these performances taken on the fly. On this release Tignor brings his background as computer scientist and composer center-stage, deconstructing his own music through performance.  Creating new compositions from key violin and piano gestures played during the acoustic performances, these "memory portraits" have a life both intimately bound to, yet completely distinct from their source works. The delicate, angular melodies of "Last Thought at Night" echo the sentimental musical anecdotes of Eric Satie, while the spartan, time-frozen world within "Meeting in a Colored Shadow" calls to mind Morton Feldman or even the fragility of Arvo Pärt. By contrast the blissful, cascading violin arpeggios on "Last Nights on Eagle Street" entangle us in a bright embrace, reminiscent of Terry Riley. Christopher is the composer and bandleader of the pioneering avant-rock group Slow Six which has released two full-lengths albums of his compositions with the Western Vinyl and New Albion labels. Christopher has performed live with avant-artists including Evan Ziporyn, John Butcher, and Zeena Parkins, and many others. / "Tignor's beguiling compositions move seamlessly through several stages of development, often ending up somewhere distant from where they appeared to be headed at the outset." The Wire / "Christopher Tignor is a composer whose music always seems to leave a door open for the listener...The often hauntingly nostalgic music always manages to give up more, the subtle electronics deepen the conventional chamber-music palette." Time Out (Top 10 Classical ) / "Bandleader and composer Christopher Tignor would be nothing without the chamber orchestra surrounding him, but it's the computerized glaze, the puffs and trails with which he ornaments the sounds, that makes the album what it is." – Pitchfork / Tracks : Last Thought at Night, Last Nights on Eagle Street, Meeting in a Colored Shadow 1, Core Memory Unwound, Meeting in a Colored Shadow 2, Left in Fragments, Cathedral (pt. 1), Cathedral (pt. 2)

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