Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.

The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.

And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:

I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.

That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.

You can find the remix project at:
http://willits-sample-library-vol1.herokuapp.com/

“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.

Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced.

A Tour of the Sounds

A lot of the samples are about variation of common materials, so there’s plenty to explore. Christopher tells us that just one sample – like this guitar solo – can take on very different meanings with different processing, heard in two variations.

Guitar process solo1-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar process solo2-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

This tone is created from a custom-made Big Muff > BOSS distortion > Fender Twin with a couple power tubes removed for low volume and max distortion. This is a trick that ted from Flipper showed me around that time, and it created the exact orange laser beam i was hearing in my imagination.

Guitar solo long noise-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar solo-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The whole piece “Plant Body” came from this guitar improvisation. With releases like “Folding and the Tea” and “Seven Machines for Summer,”

I set the process to be only the guitar recordings. With this release, I gave myself a new set of constraints and permissions, allowing my imagination to add whatever comes up for me. No judgement on which one is better to me, they are just different. There are infinite possibilities within any process I determine, yet discerning the process that resonates with my true intention is what creates the shapes and forms and colors that feel like love.

Guitar process4 fold-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The drum samples come from:

…my great friend Jeff Pierre – one of the best drummer I’ve ever worked with, and the youngest, as well. All of Jeff’s takes were one take; this sample is shortened from the original length, but you get the idea.

Drum2-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

Drums distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

I just love the lightness and feel of this sound — like the funkiest insects in the jungle, getting down.

Perc1-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Willits-120 by Willits

Someone please make a disco track out of this.

Synth arp-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

Me and my friend Reiko were messing with patterns; then we would find a loop. We were laughing so hard as we were playing this stuff.

Perc-Intend-Evolve-Willits-120 by Willits

Check your volume for this one — probably should have exported it at a lower volume for this set! The heat of this, the crushed distortion, is from a technique called input flipping on the SSL. This is an input flip with the preamps cranked, with odd harmonics.

Ryan (Ryan Kleeman) and I just about lost it when we first input flipped like this for a distorted sound. It became a theme in a sense that resonated with this orange laser beam electromagnetic sound that much of the work stems from.

Synth arp noise-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

You can also hear it here- and a few other places on the record, to a less extreme degree. There is something about this texture that has a cleaning function to me. Washes things off, away, cleans the ears out. Resets your space.

Branches Into Flowers-Willits by Willits

“Could hear many more strings and horns in this piece.”

Guitar2-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this floating feeling.”
Guitar lasers-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“This pattern makes me want to get down.”
Perc distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this kind of generative sound.”
Subconscious Transmission-Willits-120 by Willits

Two samples that were not used in “Light into Branches.” Made the baritone thing in one mode of listening, came back and asked myself, why did I put a baritone guitar solo in the middle of this song? Did I really think that’s what it needed, or did I just want to play my baritone along with this song for fun? The answer was the latter. But here it is anyway.

The ambient layers sample was to create more depth of field in the mix, have it floating behind at a low volume, but it was not doing was I wanted it to, so I cut it out.

Baritone solo unused-Light Into Branches-baritone-Willits-75ish by Willits

Guitar layers unused-Light Into Branches Willits-75ish by Willits

Videos

From the original record release:

More information:
http://ghostly.com/releases/tiger-flower-circle-sun

Soak in a Sound Bath

Another release from this year revealing Willits’ musical approach, “GOLD” is an ambient piece in you can inhabit, in which you can restore yourself, according to its maker:

GOLD is a 24 minute and 17 second sound bath / ambient piece to soak into. Listen, relax and recharge. This harmonic weaving of sound was created with the vibration of affinity, love.

Made with voice, processed guitar, and a low-frequency oscillation out of a Nord Lead synth, Christopher actually encourages people to share how they “used’ the piece and how they made it felt, a kind of design experiment for spiritual being in sound. Have a listen or pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp:

Read up on what he has to say about this release:
New Release – GOLD [Sound + Light - Chris' blog]

Infinite

It seems only appropriate to close with this reflection from Christopher:

After working on this project, I’m realizing so tangibly what I’ve always known — that any mix is a sonic photograph of vibrational affinity, and even with a grounded intention behind any mix, and a very clear outline for a process in which you allow that intention to emerge, there are infinite possibilities of expression. Infinite. It is so beautiful.

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Lusine, “Gravity” – this cut comes from A Certain Distance, a CDM favorite album in 2009. Lusine aka Jeff McIlwain is on Ghostly Internationaland, whether it’s  “abstract” electronica or downright electronic songwriting, always manages to put a unique sonic stamp on his work.

Atlas Sound, “Walkabout (with Noah Lennox)” is by Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter fame, from his album Logos.

Hudson Mohawke, “Fuse” – the Glasgow-based artist just debuted on Warp with Butter, including this track.

White Rainbow, “Raw Shanks a Million” comes from Kranky artist Adam Fornker of Oregon. It was my introduction to his work, but see more on this track below. I love its spare, pulsing beats; it sounds like what I’d listen to while jogging to Caprica City’s cybernetics research institute.

King Midas, Sound “Outta Space (Slow Version)” comes from a project started by London’s Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug. It’s a future-dub track for people who believe space is the place.

Low Limit, “Turf Day” is by San Francisco producer Bryan Rutledge, whom I knew as half of Lazer Sword, and who seems to be right at the center of the good stuff happening in electronic music in California.

Willits & Sakamoto, “Toward Water” comes from 2008’s “Ocean Fire,” the collaboration between experimental guitarist and composer Christopher WIllits and master composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. If you don’t know that full album already, it’s well worth owning.

The Field, “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet (Gold Panda Remix) revisits the track off The Field’s latest, “Yesterday and Today” – another top pick for 2009, and nicely reimagined here. You can check out Gold Panda, too; his mixes have become big Internet hits, and I love the quality of his work.

Tyondai Braxton, “Uffe’s Woodshop” is off his solo album Central Market and premiered on Pitchfork. The Battles singer is a Warp artist, composer, looper, and yes, indeed the son of Anthony Braxton. It’s an explosion of acoustic sounds amidst the other works here.

Untold, “Luna” is by London’s up-and-coming Jack Dunning, familiar on dance floors both for his original productions and remixes.

Nice Nice, “See Waves” will be a 7” from Warp Records in February, but you get to hear it here first. I love that it brings an entirely different rhythmic feel to this group.

Richard Devine, “Matvec Interior (Feat. Otto Von Schirach)” really is science fiction, an intricate set of colliding sonic forms from the composer and mad-scientist sound designer. It’s a favorite from his 2005 Cautella, but Richard revisits his sonic process for CDM here today.

Peter Kirn, “Anaxagoras” is my own track, premiering here, named for the Greek philosopher who attempted to explain astrological events through science, and fled after being called a heretic. The music, with some sounds of viola da gamba and others synthesized (or resynthesized), fall on that boundary between re-processed past and imminent future.

Now, some notes from behind the scenes:

White Rainbow

CDM: Tell us about the inspiration for this track. What was the process like?

I don’t get inspired to make something in the sense of looking at a butterfly and then writing a song. For me, it’s more like the act of making inspires where things go. The sounds as they come out inspire me to react and create on top of them.

This track was made by recording about an hour of live improv and then editing and cutting down and doing a few overdubs. My set up is:

INPUTS:
mic, computer running ableton using drum racks to trigger samples with a padkontrol, various iphone/ipod touch drum apps (beat maker, idrum etc), synth, electric guitar

MIXED/OUTPUT:

delay, multi –fx, dd-20 giga delay as looper, kaoss pad kp3 as multi-fx and looper

…and this all getting recorded into ableton on another computer in the studio.

I let that sit for a few months, then came back to it, cut things down and added vocal (with the Ableton Looper…one of the only times I’ve used that) and weird synth pad overdubs.

I’ve been making looper based music for a really long time now (going back to the original boomerang pre turn of the century). It’s really tough to keep it interesting… so I’m always looking and searching for new ways to keep myself interested and inspired to make new music in new ways.

I also play in an improvised electronic group called Rob Walmart, wherein we get very wrong and stupid and on tons of crappy gear. Tons of Casio keyboards, MicroKORGs, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS, microphones, etc.A new 3xLP of Rob Walmart will come out on Marriage Records early this year.

People probably still brand me as a new age or psychedelic ambient guy, and that’s cool but to me there is a direct line between synth future funk from the 70s and 80s and say, tangerine dream or Klaus Schultze. Just technology inspiring different people to make wild, "out there" space sounds. I would like to continue along that line.

Richard Devine

CDM: What can you tell us about this track?

I originally produced it in 2005, in collaboration with my good friend Otto Von Schirach. I was a going for something very alien, futuristic, scifi, scientific and unusual for this piece. The sonic timbres and textures are a combination of hybrid computer synthesis and field recordings. Think Aliens vs. Predator happening inside the world of HR Gigers head=)  The track initially started out in Logic Audio, I began cutting up sections and pieces of various field recorded bits. I went to many locations to get some of the sound sources. Many of them quite unusual and disturbing.

CDM: Your work always has these extraordinary layers of sound. What was the production process like on this track?

I started out on this farm near my house here in Georgia. It was during fall, and we went to this Halloween festival pumpkin patch place with my girlfriend. It was a huge field that had a petting zoo, and various other farm animals. I was intrigued by this fairly large turkey they had in a small metal wired cage. I record several takes of him frantically moving around as I got closer with my microphone. I also recorded the sounds of pigs, breathing heavy into the microphones.

I had a pair of DPA 4060′s Miniature Body Microphones clipped and tucked into my shirt sleeves to capture the animals up in close proximity. I also recorded sounds of water, sand, rocks, trees, leaves and debris in my backyard. I used a lot of these sounds and then imported them into the computer for heavy processing and manipulation. One of the main processing engines was the Kyma system by Symbolic Sound. I took a few sounds and converted them into spectral analysis files in which I morphed and re-synthesized some of the acoustic sounds into synthetic grains, or partials. Creating these very alien artificial sounding sounds to the mix. I also did a bit of FM synthesis for some of the percussion. Lots of intense programming in hundreds of layers of processed bits. You will notice that each bar in the composition never repeats, the same sounds or sequences. This was completely intentional. I wanted the entire sonic experience to be kinda like a roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics. I also tried to experiment with interesting new breaks, and redefine what could be considered song structure adhering to no rules or constraints.

CDM: Given the complexity, structurally, of this music, do you tend to iterate through a track over many layers?

I spend weeks, months sometimes designing the sounds, and trying to get all the pieces to work together. Almost like a complex microsound jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are very fractalized and tiny. Each sound I painfully program by hand. I take each sound as if it was a sculpture piece. I look at the sound in 3D structure. I often compare the sounds to architectural shapes, structures, and manipulate them one section at a time. I read the waveforms and sculpt them into what I want. I then add the pieces together to work into a composition as a whole. This is the most difficult part in my work in making everything seem fluid and natural. It is often difficult to make the transitions work within a short amount of time especially when you have so many sounds and textures you want to squeeze into a 5 or 6 minute track.

Lusine

CDM: What was your process like, creatively – particularly in regards to the vocals?

It was a very long process. It started off as something totally different. Some sort of downtempo disco type track with much more lyrical vocals. But, after several months I realized it wasn’t working for me, so I approached the whole thing from scratch, resampled everything and made a more minimal downtempo track out of it.

The vocals started off a lot more obviously upfront, but I decided to use them more as a musical layer, so I resampled the completed vocal track and started shuffling the bits around. It felt better to me, like the musical layers in the song weren’t competing with the vocals as much.

Ed.: I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on the compilation, especially since it represents three very different musical perspectives (which to me wound up making the experience richer). The TV show Caprica, for its part, premieres January 22 with another great Bear McCreary soundtrack (I’ve been listening already, as a fan of his scores).

dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. I like the curriculum: it’s not just “here’s how to use Live,” but a real focus on music production, finishing actual music, and pushing the envelope with live visuals, onstage performance and controllers. We also have a $25 discount exclusively for CDM readers if you want to attend.

I want to thank dubSpot for helping sponsor CDM this month – their support makes possible our own free tutorial content and artist coverage slated for later in May.

The tour kicks off this week in San Francisco, but will travel to other US cities soon (dates to be announced; stay tuned).

The artists doing the instruction are some folks whose work I particularly enjoy:

• Jon Margulies, author of Ableton Live 7 Power among other things, and the person doing the Live 8 curriculum here in NY. And like me, Jon is a secret Medievalist (he’s played early music at Spoleto).
• Moldover, “Moldy” to his friends, co-founded the Warper series in NYC and the new LoveTech party in SF, and has become notorious for hacking Novation keyboards and espousing controllerism.
• Christopher Willits is an utterly brilliant guitarist capable of morphing the instrument into all kinds of sounds, for those of you who don’t know his work. And he’s been doing a lovely series of tutorials for our friends at XLR8R TV.

… plus a powerful roster of artists: Funkaid for Africa, Dub Mission, Jason Short, Dub Gabriel, and Barry Cole.

The workshop is $125 for one day or $225 for both. If you are lucky enough to hail from sunny San Francisco, dubSpot is also offering a $25 CDM discount if you head to their site via this link:

http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

But we’ll have more for the rest of the world, too – I’m playing with the Warper crew on the sidewalk in front of dubSpot NY in June, and we’re working on a way of doing a live stream to the CDM planet from there. Stay tuned.