BIO
Christopher Willits is a pioneering composer, guitarist, and visual artist whose work expands how we experience sound and space. As a core artist on the Ghostly International roster since the early 2000s, he has shaped contemporary ambient music with fluid guitar harmonies, textural depth, and immersive audio innovation. His catalog spans critically acclaimed solo works, alongside collaborations with Tycho, Taylor Deupree, Zach Hill, and Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto.
At the center of Willits’ practice is harmonic spatial sound; music that creates expansive space for reflection and connection. Through this love, he co-founded and directs Envelop, a nonprofit building community through immersive listening spaces, inspiring events, and free open-source spatial audio tools (E4L). Envelop’s mission, to connect and inspire through listening, runs through his performances, installations, and studio work.
Willits brought spatial techniques into the mainstream of ambient music with Horizon (2017), Ghostly’s first spatial audio album, designed for meditation and deep listening. He continued with Sunset (2019), a score for the day’s close, and Gravity (2022), a work of calm and clarity composed during profound personal change. With New Moon (2025), he offers eleven concise meditative compositions that embody renewal, guiding listeners from darkness into light.
His collaborative path includes two albums with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ocean Fire (2008) and Ancient Future (2012), and the visual album Opening (2014), featuring the entire Tycho band. These projects broadened his palette while deepening his core idea: music as a place to restore, connect, and feel.
Willits continues to tirelessly compose, innovate, and build listening spaces, directing Envelop’s mission and creating works that treat sound as architecture for presence. With New Moon, he distills over two decades of exploration into his most focused vision yet: sound as sanctuary, and listening as a practice of presence.
ARTIST STATEMENT
”Music can allow us to feel and become more present with ourselves and others. It can catalyze inner change, and those changes within ourselves can influence changes in the world. At a young age, I realized that my life’s path was to make immersive music that helps us listen to ourselves, listen with others, and listen to the world around us. I am continuously learning and evolving through the music, letting go of all that I create as it creates me.”
