Christopher Willits: Plants and Hearts

Christopher Willits, a Bay Area music techie, described the components of his atypical instrumental Plants and Hearts with doses of production-speak: “pure droning guitar piece”, “4hz pulses”, and “panning”. That’s a lot of studio-room rigmarole for a track so vacant. “Droning” is certainly on target, though. Nearly unrecognizable guitars wade through a muck of layered sound, shifting in pitch here and there to indicate a still beating pulse. Imagine a noise composition but stripped of the rickety liveliness. Plants and Hearts is just numbingly barren, a sonic purgatory where tone and rhythm have lost their currency. Willits worsens the inaccessibility of his song with its interminable length: 21 plus minutes. What was merely quite boring then becomes masturbatory. Throughout it all, Willits unwisely shirks pop gratification in favor of post-modern drivel that he mistakes for oblique beauty.