christopher willits

Plants And Hearts

Christopher Willits is one of those rare figures in electronic music: a guitarist-come-laptop musician who sounds nothing like Fennesz. Christopher has been sounding nothing like Fennesz for a while now, on labels including 12k, Fällt and Ghostly International. For this latest release, Willits has composed a single long-form drone piece for guitar based around 4Hz isochronic pulses and panning at the same frequency. So that's you told. Apparently, it is brainwaves associated with this frequency that are conducive to meditative states and even enhanced creativity. Odd as it might seem, the room40 website warns against rocking out to this disc in your car, for fear of you coming a cropper to a bout of vertigo. On paper "Plants and Hearts" sounds like one wild trip, but in actuality, when stripped of all the press blurb. it boils down to a highly beautiful, very streamlined piece of ambient music. Cast aside the dour conceptual shenanigans and you'll find yourself with a monolithic, immersive drift-scape, played out with the utmost concentration and consistency by Willits, who sustains chords seemingly forever, only to suddenly fade to another, altering the mood and feel of the piece radically. Presenting an illusion of featureless pulsation, this is certainly one of those releases that might seem a tad impregnable at first, only letting you into its odd, disorientating universe once you've submitted to it fully; but once you're in there, you won't be coming out any time soon. Wonderful.