Architect (Expanded Edition)
Expanded Edition Featuring 5 Extra Tracks!
‘Architect’ showcases a huge breadth in songwriting abilities. Lead singles “Say” and “For” are characterised by their gentleness and warmth, while “Garden” is bright, sunny, irrepressible. On the other side, “By” and “Novices” draw more overtly from Christopher’s interest in electronic music and modern composition. He references The Knife and Arvo Pärt as willingly as Burt Bacharach and The Carpenters.
Add to that shades of Talk Talk, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, The Ink Spots and the classical and choral compositions of Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré, and a picture of the record collection that informs Christopher’s music starts to become clear.
Christopher wrote and recorded his album alone in his Glasgow flat on a bedroom studio setup, gradually adding each layer and each instrument one at a time, building up the breadth of the pieces. Though time-consuming, the process allowed for Christopher to lovingly assemble the intricacies and subtleties for this astonishingly intricate and subtle collection of music. As a composer, he is classically trained, graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – another influence clearly visible in his songwriting, in its fully-formed textures and meticulously crafted arrangements.
The son of two classical musicians, Christopher was drawn so persuasively to indie and alternative music and playing in school bands as a teen that he added guitar, bass guitar and drums to his existing repertoire of viola and piano, studying all five instruments at the same time.
The cover art for Architect, a detailed and stylised aerial view of a Glasgow side street, was created by Christopher himself. A skilled and accomplished artist, his work has been exhibited at galleries around Scotland.
