Another Magical, Otherworldly Night Staged by @tignortronics

Last week’s triumphant reprise of the initial show at Littlefield staged by composer/violinist/impresario Christopher Tignor, a.k.a. @tignortronics was magical. Sometimes lush and dreamy, other times stark and apprehensive or majestically enveloping, often within the span of a few minutes, Tignor and the two other acts on the bill, cellist Julia Kent and guitarist Sarah Lipstate a.k.a. Noveller put their own distinctly individualistic marks on minimalism and atmospheric postrock. There was some stadium rock, too, the best kind – the kind without lyrics. And much as the three composer-performers were coming from the same place, none of them were the least constrained by any kind of genre.

Kent and Lipstate built their sweeping vistas out of loops, artfully orchestrating them with split-second choreography and elegant riffage, both sometimes employing a drum loop or something rhythmic stashed away in a pedal or on a laptop (Lipstate had two of those, and seemed to be mixing the whole thing on her phone). Tignor didn’t rely on loops, instead fleshing out his almost imperceptibly shapeshifting variations with an octave pedal that added both cello-like orchestration and washes of low-register ambience that anchored his terse, unselfconsciously plaintive motives.

Kent opened her all-too-brief set with apprehensive, steady washes that built to an aching march before fading out quickly. Between songs, the crowd was  rapt: although there were pauses in between, the music came across as a suite. An anxious upward slash gave way to a hypnotic downward march and lush, misty ambience; a little later, she worked a moody, arpeggiated hook that would have made a good horror movie theme into more anthemic territory that approached Led Zep or Rasputina, no surprise since she was a founding member of that band (no, not Led Zep). Slithery harmonics slashed through a fog and then grew more stormy, then Kent took a sad fragment and built it into a staggered, wounded melody. She could have played for twice as long and no one would have said as much as a whisper.

Tignor flavored his judicious, sometimes cell-like themes with deft washes of white noise and his own slightly syncopated beat, which he played on kick drum for emphatic contrast with his occasionally morose, poignant violin phrases. A long triptych moved slowly upward into hypnotic, anthemic cinematics, then back and forth and finally brightened, with a surprisingly believable, unexpectedly sunny trajectory that of course Tignor had to end enigmatically. A slow, spacious canon of sorts echoed the baroque, more melodically than tempo-wise, its wary pastoral shades following a similarly slow, stately upward tangent. He played a dreamy nocturne with a tuning fork rather than a bow for extra shimmer and echoey lustre and wound up his set with another restless if judiciously paced partita.

Where Kent and Tignor kept the crowd on edge, Lipstate rocked the house. She began with a robust Scottish-tinged theme that she took unexpectedly from anthemic terrain into looming atmospherics. A rather macabre loop hinting at grand guignol became the centerpiece of the big, anthemic second number, long ambient tones shifting overhead.
She followed a broodingly circling, more minimalist piece with an increasingly ominous anthem that more than hinted at David Gilmour at his most lushly concise, then a postrock number that could have been Australian psych-rock legends the Church covering Mogwai, but with even more lustre and sheen. She lept to a peak and stayed there with a resounding, triumphant unease as the show wound out, through an ominous, cumulo-nimbus vortex and then a long, dramatically echoing drone-based vamp that brought the concert full circle. Tignor promises to stage another concert every bit as good as this one this coming spring; watch this space.

A November 21 Triplebill to Get Lost In, Staged by @Tignortronics

[republished from Lucid Culture’s more adventurous younger sister blog New York Music Daily]

Violinist/composer Christopher Tignor plays music that transcends pigeonholing. His slow tempos underscore the thoughtfulness and consideration that goes into his vividly evocative, often achingly angst-fueled sonic narratives. The former leader of popular indie classical/postrock ensemble Slow Six is also an impresario, working under the Twitter handle @Tignortronics. His latest show at 8 PM on November 21 at Littlefield is a real killer one, for those who like lush, richly enveloping sounds. Former Rasputina cellist and loopmusic maven Julia Kent opens the night, followed by Tignor and then cinematic, atmospheric guitarist/composer Sarah Lipstate a.k.a. Noveller. Tignor took some time away from his studio production and engineering, among other things, to answer a few pointed questions about what he’s up to:

New York Music Daily: We have a situation – which the Village Voice, of all places, touched on in an article last week – where rehearsals for performances of new, serious composed music, are becoming more and more burdensome. Moneywise, spacewise, timewise, the works. Obviously, when an ensemble is presenting a new piece of music, it’s vastly more enjoyable for everybody, not just the musicians, if the group has some familiarity with it rather than struggling through a reading, more or less cold. How does @Tignortronics offer a solution to that problem?

Christopher Tignor: Probably a few ways. I’m booking artists that deliver a cohesive voice they’ve developed over many years. To a large degree, credit needs to go to these artists who’ve already had to figure this out in order to create at the high level that they do. These aren’t classical concerts where the players live with these works for a few rehearsals. These performers have typically toured this music far and wide.

But I know from personal experience that this doesn’t scale well. The practical demands of what it takes to put together this kind of music takes a toll. To this end, I make my full rehearsal studio in Bed-Stuy freely available to artists preparing for one of my bills. Makes sense really – if they sound good, we all sound good.

But probably the most important thing I can do is make these gigs worth it for the artists. I try to fight for good deals and real soundcheck time at a venue that sounds great and that people love going to on weekends. Costs aside, artists first and foremost want to be heard and a solid gig that’s well put together can be hard to find at this end of the musical spectrum.

NYMD: You’re staging on your third consecutive bill of cutting-edge new work, this time around on November 21 at 8 PM at Littlefield. It’s a great lineup. Julia Kent, the former Rasputina cellist and a first-rate composer in her own right, then yourself, then Sarah Lipstate, a.k.a Noveller, whose music is cinematic to the nth degree. Other than the fact that there’s a lot of tunefulness, and a hypnotic, sometimes electroacoustic aspect, with loops and effects, etcetera, is there a theme to the night – other than just plain good music? Slow tempos but high energy, maybe?

Christopher Tignor: I think we all share a uniquely compatible aesthetic on this bill. It seems like we’re all bowing here. For Julia on cello and me on violin, literally, and with the sounds Noveller evokes from her guitar, sonically. Rich long tones. Aesthetic cohesion is definitely something important to these shows. Most instrumental or experimental concerts feel a like a total grab bag to me which I find annoying.

NYMD: Is this a theme that you’re going to continue, or do you have others in mind for future performances?

Christopher Tignor: I build each bill around the artists. The more experimental an aesthetic experience is, the more aesthetically focused it needs to be to work. If I encounter artists I think fit the vibe then I reach out to them and look for ways to build a show they’ll be psyched about.

NYMD: Your previous lineup, at the Silent Barn a few weeks ago, featured Sontag Shogun and their kitchen-sink assembly of instruments and loops and epic swells and fades, then Hubble, a.k.a. Ben Greenberg and his roaring guitar vortex, along with yourself. And it was on a weeknight in the middle of Bushwick and you managed to fill the room. Clearly there’s an audience for this kind of music out there among young people. Do you have a game plan for building this kind of a scene, that stays pretty much DYI and doesn’t rely on foundation funding like, say, Roulette?

Christopher Tignor: In my opinion, all today’s most interesting art comes from one of the various DIY scenes. The moneyed culture at large is generally fucked and if you’re not pushing back against it, i.e. acting counter-culturally, you’re just not getting it. Note in 2014, this does not mean starting a noisy punk band to scream lyrics about your girlfriend over chords through some hip new distortion pedal. Have fun doing that, but make no mistake that that sound is but the expected background noise of youth made right before going back to school for a “real” degree and flipping on Sex and the City. If you want to really fuck with people in a way that counts, then stop and actually think it through. Make something thoughtful before emptying your heart into it. As for growing the scene, all I can do is put this philosophy into practice and play Kevin Costner, seeing if indeed they will come.

NYMD: Why Littlefield? I happen to like the place a lot, the sonics there are fantastic and it’s actually pretty easy to get to: you just walk downhill from the Atlantic Avenue subway a few blocks and you’re right there…

Christopher Tignor: Littlefield sounds really good and looks great. It’s a fun place to actually go and really hear music with friends. That’s a prerequisite for my shows. If the shows aren’t going to feel amazing, it’s not worth my time, and certainly not yours. However, if the shows are worth my time, it turns out they are also in fact worth yours because I know what you’ve got going and it’s cool, but really this is much, much cooler.

Brooklyn Rider’s Seven Steps: In the Right Direction

There are several string quartets whose repertoire focuses on current composers (the Mivos Quartet, JACK Quartet and Chiara String Quartet, to name three especially good ones). There are others who play their own compositions, and even some who improvise, but it’s hard to think of another string quartet who manage to simultaneously carry the weight of being leaders in the world of new music, and have as much fun doing that, as Brooklyn Rider does. Pretty much every musician who makes it to major concert halls has virtuoso chops; what sets this ensemble apart is their irreproachable preference for material with substance and depth. And they are eclectic to the extreme, just as likely to dive into Armenian folk melodies or gypsy music as they are Philip Glass and Kayhan Kalhor (two composers for whom this group has become the go-to quartet). Their latest album Seven Steps is in many ways a distillation of their career, and yet a new starting point. Even if you may not agree with everything they’re doing, there’s no question that they’re shifting their paradigm.

The title track is a collective composition by violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords and cellist Eric Jacobsen, with echoes of just about every place this group has been. Kicking off with a minor-key chromatic riff that bounces warily from the cello, there are allusions to Eastern Europe, Iran and hushed IRCAM-era ambience. The group matter-of-factly works its way through this eclectic mini-suite, from suspensefully slow tectonic shifts, to swirls of harmonics from the violins, to terse but lush melodicism, atonal atmospherics that rise to a hypnotically echoey Kalhor-esque crescendo and then a whispery conclusion. The second composition is Christopher Tignor’s Together Into This Unknowable Night. Simultaneously an anthem and a tone poem (which might sound paradoxical, but it’s not), it alludes to the hook from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, swooping energetically against the ambient wash of noise from the composer’s AM radio (utilized to add texture: it never becomes intrusive). Flickering, insistent Philip Glass-like motifs (and a direct quote, maybe?) lead to a long, organlike swell fueled by the majestic gleam of the cello in tandem with the viola; like the opening track, it whispers its way out. Played at low volume, it’s a gentle nocturne, but for the musicians, it’s an inescapable vortex, a fact which makes itself loud and clear if you turn it up. It’s a characteristically vital work in the growing catalog of this ensemble’s memorable commissions.

The final piece here is an eye-opening, idiosyncratic and utterly original interpretation of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor, Op. 131. While there is an improvisational feel to some of this, notably the slinky, slippery dynamics in the introductory adagio (which begins more lento, actually), the end result is simply the logical result of the group’s interpretation of this work as the summation of a life. Essentially, what they’ve done here is tie up the loose ends, formatting Beethoven’s short, punchy phrases into a more legato architecture: Mendelssohn might have been tempted to do the same thing with it. The ensemble expands the dynamic range in the faster passages, notably in the second, Allegro Molto Vivace movement, emphasis on the vivace for awhile, but then they revert to an elegant cohesiveness: if there was ever a singleminded interpretation of this work, this is it. And yet by the end, they’re playing it pretty straightforwardly, letting Beethoven’s emphatic, unassailable confidence speak for itself: for all its apprehension, especially in the middle passages, it’s testament to a composer who simply would not be deterred, not by fashion, self-doubt, his own self-destructive tendencies or even the eventual inability to hear what he wrote. In that light, Brooklyn Rider’s approach is less radical than it is emotionally intuitive. It’s one of the most delightfully challenging recordings of the year.