Chris Letcher’s solo debut, Frieze, has received acres of glowing reviews since being released in Europe and the US, and Chris has been busy performing in the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Europe while getting extensive radio play – not only reaching the top 20 in the US on College Radio charts, but also featuring on the influential Morning Becomes Eclectic show on KCRW, Australia’s JJJ, BBC 6 Music, and BBC Radio 3. Frieze was in the top position on both eMusic’s Commercial Alternative and Progressive Rock charts in the US for ten months.

Chris has played Austin’s South by Southwest, Toronto’s North by Northeast, and has recently returned from his first Australian tour. Chris and band are going into the studio in March 2009 to work on a follow up to Frieze, set for release later in the year.

The influence of Chris’s work as a film composer is evident in Frieze’s ‘soundworld’, where strings, brass and orchestral percussion merge with found sounds, ambient street noises and overheard speech, to give the album an utterly unique, widescreen quality. Chris’s emotionally direct but impressionistic lyric-style makes each song both personal and universal. In lead song ‘Deep Frieze’ a disembodied voice reels off products in a fantastical catalogue (knitwear, ramp assembly, control module…) while a bowed glass harmonica and rising glockenspiel riff lead the listener into a wise-cracking indie rock anthem about loss and the end of a relationship (‘Hey Jason! D’you see that? They’re all so overwrought now, that’s not what you want from a band of Argonauts now’).

In ‘I Was Awake’ the perspective changes to that of a person lying in intensive care, waiting for a heart and lung transplant – contemplating the body and life’s seemingly random twists and turns; the mood is dreamy, half-hallucinated (‘life’s a dog upon the leash of lung’) while the percussive sounds are made from actual recordings of an artificial heart machine in a transplant ward. Another song, ‘Robotic Soldiers’, uses sounds recorded on the streets of downtown Johannesburg as a cinematic accompaniment to a song about a band of conscience-free automaton musicians.

London-based Chris achieved his first critical and commercial success with Urban Creep, one of South Africa's biggest rock bands. He has continued to release stunning solo and collaborative projects – recently working with Dave Matthews, Xavier Rudd and Vusi Mahlasela – as well as creating music for films and documentaries. He is currently studying towards the completion of his Doctorate in Music Composition at the Royal College of Music, London.

Playing live with Chris are Victoria Hume (keyboards/voice), Andrew Joseph (bass), Phil Wakeman (guitar/voice) David Eugene Webb (drums/glock). Guests include Quinta (Bat for Lashes) on viola/saw.