Many times we are fond of comparing human beings to machines and vice-versa. Concepts like "system", "memory", and even "infection" frequently overlap as valid words for both biology and computer science, creating a certain ambivalence that informs our way of understanding our bodies as much as our PCs. They’re both tools, instruments used to get in touch with the world, and since maybe there’s no realm of ideas and we’re just a functional mass of organs, downloading updates from experiences in life, they’re us, our ever-so-superficial essence. And yet there’s always certain things that make us think twice about such superficiality, music being one of them: how can these worldly tools produce something so spiritual? How can machines playing others create something that transcends them both?

I’ll never know, but perhaps the answer lies in looking at what is inherently beyond them: the end. Core Memory Unwound could be the final moment of a machine, in which the coils of information become undone and are processed backwards, reading into the past. The programming deconstructs in the logical, minimalist steps of an electronically enhanced duo of violin and piano, delayed with great craftsmanship to form an ambient feeling over some very precise chamber music. “Last Thought at Night” whispers and echoes through a soundscape of loneliness freed from dramatic excess, at times calmly intense just like the liquid, subconscious instant when we pass from being awake to being asleep. Once there, we can experience the “Last Nights on Eagle Street”, boasting an entrance that combines the dynamism of John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” with Terry Riley’s early electronic manipulations; as the ambience builds up and merges with the minimal piano phrases, we can listen to the machine’s whole system at work, its patterns unveiling as compressed sound fades in and out in bursts of electricity, just like in the title track itself, when the data is becoming something else, bytes and binary lines transforming into memories and emotions.

The functioning of machines generates sounds permanently, in a way that makes silence a distant ideal; even when locked up in the most sound-proof room we’ll still find the high-pitched noise of our circulatory system ringing in our ears. Silence is then formed from sounds as an idea inferred, a space in music that lets the nothingness slip in and fill it with introversive passion. Christopher Tignor invokes these spaces with a mechanical grace that makes pieces like “Meeting In a Colored Shadow” hauntingly moving, often deeply ‘disturbing’ in the sense Arvo Pärt’s pieces are; in this case, the electronic hums of contemplation are slowly enriched by quick data transfers of violin and piano in a way that doesn’t break the feeling of being in a great expanse of sacred, inner, nothingness. The album closer, “Cathedral” (in two parts), is another example of it, as well as a symbolic final word: when the machines stop, we will find ourselves in presence of the divine, not itself, but inferred (like silence) by our creations – a building, a sound, a painting… is that inference what answers our original question?

Again, I don’t know, and you’ll probably have a better answer. Still, at only eight tracks and one hour of music, I found myself wanting more of this brilliant approach to time in reverse, systems shutting down, and whatever exists between every bit of information processed. Tignor created some fine music as composer of the Slow Six, but, to conclude simply, this is way more awesome.