Christopher Willits

San Francisco-based multimedia artist Christopher Willits studied visual arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and earned a master's degree in electronic music at Mills College. By 2006, he released a handful of albums credited solely to him -- including 2002's Pollen and Folding, and the Tea, as well as 2006's more song-oriented Surf Boundaries -- in addition to numerous collaborations. He has recorded with Flössin (featuring Kid 606 and Hella's Zach Hill), North Valley Subconscious Orchestra (with Medicine's Brad Laner), and Taylor Deupree. His releases since then include 2007's Listening Garden (recorded with Deupree, designed for low-volume outdoor listening) and Ocean Fire (with Ryuichi Sakamoto), and 2010's Tiger Flower Circle Sun.

from Wikipedia:

Christopher Willits is a musician and multimedia artist located in San Francisco. Willits is "a prominent experimental musician from the San Francisco Bay area" and "a pioneer and a teacher, exploring new methodologies for signal processing.". He has been instrumental in redefining the guitar in the digital age. Through diverse projects his focus has remained on guitar and computer software processing and improvisation, which generates a large palette of possible sounds including; melodic rhythms, grainy textures, and smooth undulating ambient layers. His music is electroacoustic in nature, in that both analogue and digital worlds are meshed into one. Pitchfork states that Willits "paints with his guitar". Willits is "a purveyor of both beauty and experimentation, a video director and a musician, a composer and performer, an artist and organizer, bringing together different scenes (through the platform Overlap.org).". He has created a brand of "incredibly intelligent compositions that manages to be hard to pinpoint into a genre".

Biography

Willits completed a master's degree in electronic music at Mills College, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith and John Bischoff. At Mills he explored structure-generating processes in music; a focus not unfamiliar to former Mills affiliates John Cage and Steve Reich. Prior to Mills, Willits received visual arts training in painting, sculpture, photography and film/video/new media art at the Kansas City Art Institute under the direction of Patrick Clancy.

Willits, as a solo artist or in collaboration, has released music on the following record labels: 12k (USA), Ghostly International (USA), Fällt (Ireland), Sub Rosa (Belgium), Nibble Records (USA), Ache Records (Canada), Yacca (Japan) and Plop (Japan). He has toured throughout Europe, America, China and Japan.

Willits has participated in numerous projects, including collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Zach Hill (drummer from the band Hella), Miguel Depedro (Kid606), Brad Laner (Medicine), Nate Boyce, Latrice Barnett (singer/songwriter and bassist for Handsome Boy Modeling School), Taylor Deupree (12k record label founder), Scott Pagano (visual artist and motion graphics designer), Matmos. Willits is also the founder and director of the record label and community building organization Overlap [1].

Folding

Willits' guitar lines and harmonies are folded into each other using custom-designed software (Willits uses the term "folding" to describe the non-linear, real-time indexing, cutting and re-sampling of guitar and voice).

Willits, in an interview, further expanded on the term 'folding,' "It has a lot to do with time. I actually wrote a whole thesis about this, if you want to go to the Mills library and check it out [laughs]. It’s a very simple process of recording something to memory and then indexing at different points. But instead of it being a granular process [a form of synthesis in which a sample is separated into ‘grains’], I’m actually skating to different locations within this memory. So there’s this continuous rupture of time that creates these rhythmic patterns, so these melodic patterns start to emerge out of this time processing technique."

Video Work

please expand

Photography

please expand

Workshops

please expand

Software

Willits uses Ableton Live, Max for Live, and Touch Designer for video processing.

Overlap.org

Christopher Willits participates in a couple prominent online communities for musicians. One being http://overlap.org which is involved in creative community building events.

Citations