Christopher Tignor
“A Light Below” Record Release
with openers Benoît Pioulard and Julia Kent
6:30pm doors • 7:30pm show
About
Iconoclastic violinist, composer, and interactive software engineer Christopher Tignor presents an immersive sound and visual performance celebrating his latest solo LP, A Light Below.
With his emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electroacoustic practices, Tignor has won acclaim from both the classical and rock communities over the course of 8 LPs. Produced by Anohni’s former musical director and William Basinski’s orchestral arranger, Maxim Moston, A Light Below is an emotionally ambitious work integrating modern electronic forces with acoustic instruments.
Opening the evening will be Rasputina and Antony and the Johnsons cellist and composer Julia Kent, along with ambient folk singer-songwriter Benoît Pioulard.
Experience live, for one night only, this meticulously crafted and boundlessly expressive evening of contemporary music.
Tickets
The Artists
Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, lecturer, and software engineer. His emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electroacoustic practice have won acclaim within both the classical and experimental communities across 8 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, string orchestra A Far Cry, and string quartet Brooklyn Rider, performing alongside them at premier venues including Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. As a string arranger he has worked with Helios, John Congleton, This Will Destroy You, Meshell Ndegeocello, and several other artists at the boundaries of popular music.
As a result of his unique performance technique using tuning forks, Christopher is a sponsored artist of the German tuning fork maker Wittner. Likewise, renowned software leader Antares sponsors Christopher for his inventive application of Auto-Tune as a “choral” violin harmonizer.
Since a young age, Benoît Pioluard (Thomas Meluch) has been fascinated by natural sounds and the textures of decay. He began playing piano before his feet could reach the pedals, and for more than a decade has sought to create a unique sonic environment by combining remnants of pop song structures with the lushness and unpredictability of field recordings. A veteran drummer of a half dozen bands and an avid collector of instruments and analog devices, Meluch relies on guitar and voice as the basis for his work as Benoît Pioulard.
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 followup solo record, she continued to use looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings to explore the intersections between the human and natural worlds, 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 theater, 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 theater 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.
