“When I'm writing,” says Pat Gossi, aka Active Child, “I'm hoping to get some sort of clarity. Not a resolution, but some sense of relief. It's a confession in a lot of ways. That was the tough thing about going back to a lot of the songs on You Are All I See - I felt a little naked thinking about everyone else listening to them.”

Gossi is on the road, “somewhere in Indiana”, and headed to Chicago for a show, harp in tow. You Are All I See is his recently released debut LP, a balanced work of angst and sensuality, layered with classical harp strings and glacial '80s synthpop, with Gossi's ex-choir boy falsetto crowning each score. There's an unmistakable R&B flavor running through the LP, and a soul-baring intimacy that Gossi found himself a little surprised by once recording had finished. “I was going through some tough times in the relationship I was in at the time. It was also a really wet winter in LA in Nov/Dec when I was writing most of the songs, tucked away in my parents' house in California. It was a dismal kind of setting, which I actually prefer. I liked being inside, safe and cosy.”

Gossi made his debut with 2010's Merok Records EP, Curtis Lane, but wrote a lot of the follow-up LP (out on LA-based label Vagrant) in Big Sur, just south of San Francisco, where he'd rented a little spot in a hippie commune built into the hillside, attempting to compose but mostly hiking and exploring the surrounding wilderness. The setting is a stretch from the cloistered spirit of his first musical experiences in the Philadelphia Boys Choir as a nine-year-old New Jersey kid. Religion was largely absent in Gossi's childhood, but the nature of choral singing saw him performing in large cathedrals and stately churches. He found himself sensitive to the importance of these sacred places of worship. “That, happening so early and being my first musical expression - it was humbling. Even if you're not religious yourself, you appreciated those spaces for what they meant to other people.”

There's a hymnal magic to You Are All I See - is it possible the churches of Gossi's childhood inspired him to apply the same reverence to the intimacy of romance and lyrical self reflection? “Definitely. Religious or not, when you’re in a church or a cathedral you feel a sense of calm or inspiration just being in that space; they're kind of designed for that. That's always been something that I wanted to pull out in my own music.”

Gossi might have spun angelic verses with his Philadelphia brethren, but he found himself weaned on rather different sounds at home. “I fell in love with rap at a young age, mostly because my older brothers were really into it; we had stacks of vinyl everywhere” he remembers. His father's job at Priority Records, EMI's purveyor of prime West Coast rap (Eazy-E, N.W.A, 2Pac) meant a lot of the label's releases found their way onto the family turntable.

Did he ever visit the Priority offices or get to meet any the label's titans? “I met Dre, Snoop and Eminem, and other artists like Peanut Butter Wolf. It was really cool. All my friends thought my dad was a cool dude.” There's rap flavor to some of his drum-loop percussion, but Gossi's rather singular Active Child trademark is the harp. “I got into it about seven or eight years ago,” he says. “I'd been pining to try one out for years after seeing a friend play one”. A chance visit to a music shop, years later, with a friend who was returning an instrument, fixed this. “They had a harp show room. The clerk said I could take it home to try for free, and that if I liked it I could rent it. I paid 30 dollars a month for about 2 years,” he chuckles, “and finally owned it. I've been addicted to it ever since”. He's a fan of fellow harpist Joana Newsom, but can't boast her classical training. “I've schooled myself in a lot of ways, taught myself my own tricks.”

Gossi's been performing under the Active Child moniker since 2008, putting out a cassette-only release, Sun Rooms, in 2009 through Mirror Universe and following up with the aforementioned Curtis Lane EP, but admits there's a cache of material that fans haven't heard. “There's some early stuff that I wrote that I haven't released. It's different - more experimental, me using less electronics and more instruments, stuff that happened to be around at the time and close to hand, organs and different drum kits. I don't know if I'm ever going to release them or not,” he says thoughtfully. He's a deft hand at remixing, with numbers for Steve Mason, Chad Valley and Lonely Galaxy under his belt. “I tend to focus on the vocals when I remix other artists. I strip everything else away and try to find a new mood, to take the melody and make it fresh,” he says, but its female vocalists he's most enamored with, naming The Knife's Karin Andersson, Björk and the inimitable Sade as dream remix subjects.

When it comes to reassessing his own material, Gossi exacts the same amount of honesty he steeps his songs with, telling a recent interviewer that if he could change anything about You Are All I See's process, he'd “go back and tell myself: “Tune out as much as possible. Ignore the person looking over your shoulder: the blogs and Pitchforks and all of them. Fuck all that. Don't think about what they think. Do what resonates personally.” It's a pretty brave admission. “There's a certain innocence is lost in all that. Its tough to block it all out. It's become so ingrained in us, in our every day lives.” Gossi finds the white noise of social media and the hive voice of the blogosphere leaves him hankering for something simpler. “I'd like to go back to pre-MySpace days, when I was just making music and exploring it all. Its good and bad,” he considers. “It propels you more, makes you want to be better, but it can also be really daunting.”

Some of the best art happens when the artist gets a little uncomfortable, a little naked, as Gossi now knows. “It's a double edged sword - you don't want to over-expose yourself, but you still want to write songs that are sincere and powerful. You just have to put yourself out there,” he says with cheerful resignation.

Active Child live dates:
Oct 19: St Pancras Church, London