Biography All Music GuideWikipedia
All Music Guide:
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 after Surf Boundaries have included 2007's Listening Garden (recorded with Deupree, designed for low-volume outdoor listening) and Ocean Fire (with Ryuichi Sakamoto), 2010's Tiger Flower Circle Sun, and 2012's Ancient Future (with Sakamoto).
Wikipedia:
Christopher Willits is a US musician and multimedia artist located in San Francisco. 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".
Biography [edit]
Willits completed a master's degree in electronic music at Mills College.
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.
Folding [edit]
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."
Workshops [edit]
Willits regularly gives workshops on the creative process and his custom software. He hosted a video series on XLR8R entitled "What You Talkin' Bout, Willits?" in which he delved into techniques of making music with a laptop and being a professional musician.
Software [edit]
Willits uses Ableton Live, Max for Live, and Touch Designer for video processing.
Overlap.org [edit]
Christopher Willits participates in a couple prominent online communities for musicians. One being http://overlap.org which is involved in creative community building events.
