Christopher Willits appears to be a jack of all trades, his past occupations range from the contextual obvious – record producer, musician – to the more incongruous kind – multimedia artist, painter and teacher. However, whilst his CV may be a comprehensive list of impressive career endeavours, musically Willits only plays with one genre. This genre being a marriage between the classical sounds produced by a guitar and the electronic noises he creates using self-manufactured software. Willits verbally simplifies this combination of old and new with the self-coined phrase ‘folded guitar’.

New release Tiger Flower Circle Sun doesn’t break artistic conventions, with the LP being an excellent display of electronic production – no surprise due to the fact Willits has a Master Degree in electronic music. Moreover, each of the 15 tracks contains a fortifying concoction of melodies, textures and rhythms all interlaced with one another. However, whilst the songs sound beautiful with their jittering strobes and clever use of guitar, behind all that, there’s well nothing.

Throughout the LP songs seem a bit vacuous – empty, and it’s this lack of depth and therefore feeling that’s the albums achilles heel, even listening to album closer ‘Flowers Into Stardust’ with it’s pulsing ambience, there’s still no emotion instigated within the listener, besides the already established awe at how impressive everything sounds.

So when feeling is finally produced it’s a great joy, see album highlight ‘Lights Into Branches’, a rarity of the album, where vocals are endorsed and more of the focus is directed on the guitar instead of the superficial sounds, it’s all to great effect. But even this rare blip of feeling, can’t mask the album’s other problems; at 15 tracks in length it’s bordering on monotonous and the pseudo-skipping an ingenious offset at first ends up being an annoyance. In some respects, this album is well and truly analogue perfection, but who wants to create or listen to perfection that’s stalemate and lifeless?

Overall, it’s an album that cements Willits electronic production skills as nothing short of exceptional, and needless to say if this was his debut it would be dazzling. But it’s not, and with Willits’ back catalogue dating back 10 years plus it fair to say I was expecting more.