Christopher Willits

Surf Boundaries

Ghostly International

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Christopher Willits's musical signature is the way he digitally "folds" his guitar sounds over each other, to borrow the language of his 2002 album, Folding, and the Tea. On the San Francisco artist's latest full-length, Surf Boundaries, electric and acoustic guitars still wrap across each other in a strange fabric of processed blips, clicks and bloops, but now they're part of dreamy pop songs rather than minimalist electronic compositions. The album's ostensible subject is a relationship falling apart, made more poignant by the fact that Willits's singing partner, Latrice Barnett, is the girl he broke up with. The album's highlight is its romantic apex, the shimmering "Colors Shifting", which sounds like Fennesz covering laptop softie the Postal Service. Awash in crackles and glitches, Willits and Barnett exchange hushed, pure imagery about love's power to change pretty much everything. But soon the colors shift again, from "Medium Blue" to "Green and Gold" and "Yellow Spring," drums clattering as a relationship fades. Either way, Willits's inventive sonic textures leave plenty of room to get lost in. Finale "The Greatest Rain" turns around the musical motifs of "Colors Shifting," finding the bitter sadness in the original's bliss. Let the guitars fold around you like a blanket, or risk getting the chills.

-- Marc Hogan