Christopher Tignor / Earthen Sea / Connor Armbruster

Christopher Tignor 

"A bulwark against the ambient clatter of everyday life...sheer technical mastery”
— Bandcamp (Album of the Day)

Christopher Tignor is an NYC based composer, violinist, 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.

As part of the duo Disassembler, with This Will Destroy You's Chris King, Tignor released A Wave from a Shore (Western Vinyl) in March 2022, followed by US and UK touring, including performances at SXSW. As a composer Tignor 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 string arranger he has worked with Helios, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, This Will Destroy You, Meshell Ndegeocello, and several other artists at the boundaries of popular music.

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Earthen Sea (Kranky) is the experimental ambient/techno solo project of Jacob Long, best known to indie rock fans as a member of the Dischord-signed post-hardcore group Black Eyes and the dubby, drum-heavy post-punk band Mi Ami. On his own, he crafts a compelling synthesis of shadowy rhythms and opaque atmospherics, drawing on the most potent qualities of melancholic ambient and dub techno similar to artists like Loscil, Deepchord, and the Sight Below. He began releasing Earthen Sea material during the early 2000s. Released on limited-edition cassettes and CD-Rs, some of his earliest material utilized violin, tape decks, and keyboards to create eerie soundscapes.

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Armbruster is an electric violinist and fiddle player from Troy, NY. Improvising over composed textures and simple repetitions, he imbues each performance with raw emotion while taking the listener on a journey accompanied by a visual score. His debut album with Dear Life Records, Masses, is a live exploration of a massive, empty church and a reflection on loss and renewal with references to neo-classical, ambient, and Irish folk music.