Christopher Tignor - "Bleeding Past The Edges" Record Release Show + Julia Kent

About

Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, lecturer, and software engineer. 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 collaborator he has worked with Rachel Grimes, Helios, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, This Will Destroy You and several other artists at the boundaries of popular music. Joining for a few songs will be dancer Rachelle Somma, a Brooklyn-based pole choreographer and instructor with over 12 years of experience. Drawing from a unique foundation in ballet and Shaolin kung fu, she brings a rare blend of precision and power to the air and the floor. While much of today’s AI-driven culture moves toward removing the human hand from the act of creation, Christopher Tignor’s new album ‘Bleeding Past the Edges’ moves deliberately in the opposite direction. In a small studio filled with cables, tuning forks, pedals, a laptop, and the familiar weight of his violin; Tignor has created a performance system that behaves less like a machine and more like a living instrument. Through this system he performs melodies and rhythms that are captured, reshaped, and returned in real time without loops or backing tracks. Bowed notes become layered patterns. A struck tuning fork becomes the seed of an entire harmonic landscape. Percussive hits trigger evolving structures that spiral outward from a single motion. The result is a full orchestral field generated live by a single performer navigating a web of instruments, code, and timing. For Tignor it is not simply technology, each composition on the record is something that must be physically played, guided and held together by the body of the performer. Every texture here begins with a human gesture and remains tied to it. After years spent performing and recording with other artists and groups, Canadian-born, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo debut, Delay, an exploration of the private emotional worlds that exist within the disjunctions and disorientations of travel, hailed for its “lovely, melancholy” compositions, full of “aching romanticism…rich melodicism, and detailed arrangements.” She toured to support it throughout Europe and North America, and subsequently released an EP, Last Day in July. In Green and Grey, her following solo record, she continued to use looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings to explore the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the world that surrounds us. She moved to the Leaf Label to release Character in 2013 and Asperities in 2015. Her most recent record, Temporal, came out in January 2019. Made up mostly of music originally created to accompany dance and theatre, it is a meditation on the passing of time and the fragility of existence. In addition to her solo albums, Julia Kent has composed a number of original film scores, as well as music for theatre and dance performances. She has toured throughout Europe and North America, including appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Donau festival in Austria, Meltdown in London, the Unsound festival in New York City, Reeperbahn in Hamburg, CTM in Berlin, and Mutek in Montreal.