PRESS RELEASE
For His Debut on Delos, Boundary-Pushing Violinist and Composer Tim Fain Offers Unraveling, An Album of Powerful Works Including Three Premiere Recordings
Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning violinist/composer Tim Fain joins the Delos roster of artists with his debut album for the label, Unraveling. A unique voice on the music scene, Tim is at the forefront of technology, and has performed, composed music for, and produced boundary-pushing projects in collaboration with Google, Samsung, Facebook, BBC, and TEDx, among many others. He can also be heard on the soundtracks to many acclaimed films, including Black Swan, The Tragedy of Macbeth, 12 Years a Slave, and Don’t Look Up.
His first album for Delos, Unraveling, was born from a time of profound uncertainty. Conceived against a backdrop of the pandemic, political upheaval, climate crisis, and rising mental health struggles among the youth population, this collection of works is not a surrender to despair, but a search for meaning, resilience, and hope. This album is a journey from disintegration to renewal; the award-winning violinist and composer performs his own deeply personal composition, Unraveling, alongside powerful works by John Corigliano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Bryce Dessner.
Unraveling
Tim Fain, Unraveling * Premiere recording
Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lachen Verlernt
John Corigliano, STOMP
Philip Glass, Two Poems * Poem No. 2 – Premiere recording
Bryce Dessner, Ornament and Crime
Missy Mazzoli, Dissolve, O My Heart
Meredith Monk, Return to Earth (arr. Tim Fain) * Premiere recording
Tim Fain, violin
Release Date: 17 October 2025
DE3611, Delos
About the program
“The album expresses my coming to terms with our broken, unstable world in late 2020,” Fain commented, “and is an attempt to grasp how incomprehensively quickly things were crumbling around us.” With a keen awareness of just how fragile and transient everything had become, and the escalation in other world crises, including political and financial volatility, the urgency of climate change, and an alarming increase in mental illness among young people, he struggled to imagine a positive future.
He searched for hope through his compositional work and instead of leaning into nihilism, he “deeply wanted these new realities to be an appreciation of the good and a call to action to take care of and love our world and the other beings within it even more.” These ideas were the spark for this very personal album, deeply meaningful not only for its representation of his own journey, but because of his close relationships to many of its composers.
Hearing Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach as a child was one of the reasons Fain began playing the violin. He never imagined that he and Glass would ultimately become close friends and colleagues – with Fain a frequent touring partner for many years, performer of his violin concerti, and longtime champion of his works. Fain had been eager to premiere another work by Glass ever since the composer wrote his towering 30-minute Partita for him, so the work on this album feels personally significant.
Working in close artistic collaboration with Meredith Monk on this new version of her work Return to Earth was also a uniquely rewarding experience. Fain commented that “Meredith’s work has a real physicality to it – rhythms and gestures are derived from movement, dance, and breath. The challenge was to create textures and timbres with string instruments that stayed true to the original spirit of the vocal score, while transporting the piece to an entirely different sound world.”
The album includes a wide range of styles and extremes, from John Corigliano’s disintegration of American fiddle technique in STOMP to Bryce Dessner’s violin-meets-synthesizer driving kineticism in Ornament and Crime, which Fain performed for the AppleTV series Manhunt, to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s dystopian musical exploration of a world without laughter in Lachen Verlernt, and Philip Glass’ strikingly intimate ode to silence and isolation in Two Poems, bookended by Meredith Monk’s hypnotic Return to Earth, and Fain’s own Unraveling. These assembled works, with all of their disparate, yet connected musical elements, represent an attempt to understand and embrace our great capacity for gratitude, a yearning for action amidst a feeling of helplessness, and journeying toward a true and meaningful sense of agency in our lives.
Fain explained that his piece “Unraveling is meant to be played with pre-recorded music and 17 layered and looped violins, exploring the limits of pitch and intensity on the violin.” He realized he could potentially create the work from start to finish, composing, performing, and recording it himself in his own studio, but by the time he recorded it in 2023, he was able to collaborate with producers, engineers and more.
About Tim Fain
Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning violinist and composer Tim Fain has appeared on today’s greatest stages as orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. He is increasingly recognized for his work as a composer with an authentic voice, pushing the envelope with cutting-edge technology.
He premiered his violin concerto Edge of a Dream across the United States. His work Resonance, commissioned by Google/YouTube for a groundbreaking VR video, was recorded by The Knights, with conductor Eric Jacobsen, and subsequently shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His works were also used for campaigns by Sierra Club, Made in a Free World, The North Face, and Ralph Lauren.
Heard on the soundtracks to the GRAMMY®-nominated Black Swan, The Tragedy of Macbeth, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, Don’t Look Up, Indignation, and HBO’s Succession, Fain is also known for his original film music, with scores for Munch (Best Nordic Film nominee, Göteborg Film Festival) and the stop-motion film Los Huesos (Best Short, Venice Film Festival).
Fain continues to be at the forefront of technology, with boundary-pushing projects and VR experiences for Samsung at the TriBeCa Film Festival, Facebook/Oculus, NYC’s The Future of Storytelling, Forbes and the city of Jerusalem, and SXSW. Fain’s LED light installation with Symmetry Labs was featured on BBC and PBS, and he gave a TEDx talk on emerging technologies in music.
Whether touring in a duo with Philip Glass, performing as soloist with the National Orchestra of Spain or American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, or collaborating with artists from Mitsuko Uchida, Pinchas Zukerman, or Simone Dinnerstein, to DJ Spooky, Iggy Pop, Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty), and Christina Aguilera, Fain electrifies audiences. His wildly diverse career has taken him to unique spaces world-wide, including on stage at the New York City Ballet, The Vatican, and a performance for the Dalai Lama’s birthday.
He performs on a Francesco Gobetti violin from Venice (the “Moller,” 1717), on extended loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the generous efforts of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
A NOTE FOR EDITORS
For interview requests for Tim Fain, contact:
elizabeth@dworkincompany.com
allison@dworkincompany.com
For more information and physical promotional copies, please contact:
Delos / Outhere Music
General Press: internationalpress@outhere-music.com
US: Paula Mlyn – paula@a440arts.com
Delos: https://outhere-music.com/en/labels/delos
Outhere Music: https://outhere-music.com
