Midnight Mango

Chris Wood started out as a choirboy and much of his music bears the influence of those years. He describes the album Handmade Life as "church music with drums."

Self-taught on guitar and violin, he is a always direct and unafraid to speak his mind, his song writing has been praised for its surgical clarity. His work is typified by his trust in the space music can create and a gift for lyrical understatement.
Throughout his career independence has been balanced by collaboration. The artists he has worked with include Billy Bragg, Andy Gangadeen, Andy Cutting, Jean François Vrod and Hugh Lupton (Wood and Lupton’s "One in a Million" won Best Original Song at the BBC 2 Folk Awards in 2006). Recently he has worked alongside Martin and Eliza Carthy and others in The Imagined Village: "Cold Haily Rainy Night", performed by Wood and Eliza Carthy, took the award for Best Traditional Song at the Folk Awards in 2008.

His first solo album, The Lark Descending, was released in 2006 to wide acclaim. In 2009 his album, Trespasser, took on the idea of enclosure: spiritual, intellectual, cultural and physical. He has been more reticent about the genesis of Handmade Life — but the material clearly stems from a desire to explore a less human-centered world, and a world more engaged with the actual than the virtual.