For many of us, isolation is disconcerting and challenging but for wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson, it is something he actively seeks, so he can fully immerse himself in a place and capture its unique sounds in his recordings. In this series, Chris recalls five extraordinary quests to locations around the world in search of isolation and wild sounds. Producer Sarah Blunt
Yearly Archives: 2021
Chernobyl Live, Athens | Sunday 10th October 2021
This year’s programme features a huge, world-class surprise concert. Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (winner of an Academy Award for Best Original Score for the film Joker) invites audiences to Peiraios 260 for a live performance of her Grammy-winning soundtrack for the acclaimed HBO television series Chernobyl. Recorded in a decommissioned nuclear plant in Lithuania, Guðnadóttir’s haunting soundscapes will now be recreated live against the backdrop of the Festival’s beloved industrial venue at Peiraios 260.
Electronic Sound: Field Recording – A beginner’s Guide
electronicsound.co.uk/shop/p/issue-79
We are investigating the fine art of Field Recording in the latest issue of Electronic Sound and we have a superb double CD – more than two hours of brilliant music – to accompany the magazine.
So what’s the allure of capturing the sounds of the world around us? Why do people do it? How do they go about it? And what do they do with their recordings? We’ve talked to many of our most innovative field recordists for this month’s cover feature, including Haiku Salut, Erland Cooper and Langham Research Centre. We meet one-time Cabaret Voltaire man Chris Watson, a leading practitioner of the art for decades, and Simon Fisher Turner has some great tips for anybody who is just starting out. We also get a history lesson courtesy of Lawrence English from the Room40 label and have a rummage around the 4,500 field recordings on the Cities And Memory website.
Elsewhere in this issue, the new LoneLady record is irresistible, as is our interview with her. Richard Norris drops in for a chat about the three albums he’s releasing (yes, that’s right, three whole albums) and we hook up with Sunroof, aka Mute boss Daniel Miller and ace producer Gareth Jones. Oh, and you might need to sit down for this next bit, because we have let a guitarist in. It’s OK, though, because it’s the most excellent Will Sergeant from Echo & The Bunnymen, whose side hustles totally belong in our world.
We’re bundling this month’s Electronic Sound with ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Field Recording’, a double CD which we’ve put together with the help of the Cities And Memory website. The two discs feature more than two hours of beautiful music, with contributions from the cream of the current crop of field recordists, including Chris Watson, Kate Carr, Roberta Fidora, Leafcutter John, Elif Yalvaç, Simon Fisher Turner, Erland Cooper, Lawrence English, Haiku Salut, Langham Research Centre, Georgia Rodgers, Dave Clarkson and many more besides. ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Field Recording’ is an astonishing listen, so miss this one at your peril!
As with all of our releases, this CD is strictly limited and only available to Electronic Sound readers, so make sure you grab your copy right away.
Ruhrtriennale @ Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck, Germany | 14th August 2021
SHORTLY BEFORE SUNRISE, THE SPIRITS OF THE NIGHT DANCE THEIR LAST DANCE
KONZERT IM MORGENGRAUEN
CHRIS WATSON, MAURICE RAVEL, SALVATORE SCIARRINO, VIRGINIE DÉJOS
www.ruhrtriennale.de/en/programme/konzert-im-morgengrauen/36
Chris Watson Morgenchor (2021) spacial sound piece (World Premiere)
Maurice Ravel Gaspard de la nuit
Salvatore Sciarrino De la nuit
Shortly before sunrise, the spirits of the night dance their last dance. When Maurice Ravel wrote his ghostly pieces Gaspard de la nuit he was constantly confronted by the imminent death of his father. His walk along the border between this life and the next moves back and forth between seriousness, grotesque and mythical fantasy, but it is characterised most of all by an almost superhuman, transcendental virtuosity.
The young French pianist Virginie Déjos not only confronts Ravel’s ghosts but also the spirit behind these ghosts: in a short composition by the Italian Salvatore Sciarrino entitled De la nuit, he stirs up scraps of memories from Ravel’s Gaspard, dreamily and at breakneck speed, only to make them vanish again in a moment as if into nothingness.
Both of these compositions are embedded in a concert installation commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale from the British sonic artist Chris Watson – a founder member of the electro-industrial band Cabaret Voltaire and a sound recordist on David Attenborough’s famous nature films for the BBC – who will use soundscapes recorded shortly before, during and after sunrise to draw horizontal and vertical axes through the historical strata past and present of the Ruhr and its sister region in the North of England and connect them both through sound.
Relic: Maggi Hambling & Chris Watson
An installation at Snape Maltings 2 June – 31 August 2021
Relic is an installation by the artist Maggi Hambling and sound recordist Chris Watson, presented by Britten Pears Arts at Snape Maltings.
Each artist in their own practice responds to the melting of the polar icecaps: Hambling through her series of Edge paintings first shown in 2017, and Watson through his location sound recordings. In this collaboration, the audience is confronted with the gradual, man-made disaster through expanded senses of sound and vision. As if on the threshold of a dream, chaos clashes with order, night meets day, primordial forms rise out of the dissolving icecap to confront the visitor with our destruction of the planet.
Interview in Toneglow | March 2021
After co-founding the influential Sheffield industrial band Cabaret Voltaire in the 1970s, Chris Watson turned to field recording. He has had an illustrious career as a sound recordist with both solo work and commissions for organizations like National Geographic and the BBC Natural History Unit. His solo albums for Touch include Weather Report (2003) and El Tren Fantasma (2011), both classics in their genre…
Music Matters BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
Saturday 30th January, 11:45am| Monday 1st February, 10:00pm
Kate Molleson talks to Scottish writer and poet Jackie Kay about the extraordinary life of the pioneering blues singer Bessie Smith, and asks what Bessie’s blues can tell us a century on.
Kate also hears from American composer Meredith Monk about the recurring nature of the big themes of her work, from plagues to dictatorships, and we hear about the piece she’s currently working on, Indra’s Net – 10 years in the making and a work dedicated to humanity’s relationship with nature.
Plus, as part of the BBC’s ‘Soundscapes for Wellbeing’ project, we look at how natural and musical soundscapes can affect mental health, including a groundbreaking study by the University of Exeter called ‘The Virtual Nature Experiment’, which explores how digital experiences of nature might impact wellbeing. Kate is joined by Alex Smalley from the University of Exeter, the sound recordist Chris Watson, and composer Nainita Desai.
Producer: Matthew Dover
Touch: Displacing | Station Chapelle
Chris Watson
“Station Chapelle”
The international passengers edge slowly towards Bruxelles Midi, their faces pressed against the train windows as they pass Station Chapelle, not knowing whether they are there yet. Is this where we get off? No. This is a ghost station, so the engine staggers onward, wheels grinding, stop/start, giving way at signals to the faster traffic coming in the opposite direction.
Hearing not so much the sound of the suburbs but the unvoiced anxiety of those who fear they might miss their onward connections, to Paris, Antwerp, maybe beyond even Amsterdam, passengers reach up for their luggage…
Feeling that they’ve mislaid something, they look around, above and below but cannot work out what it is maybe they have lost. Something’s been taken away, leaving uncertainty or worse, but most shrug and start the next phase of their journey. Things have to be done.
We start the New Year…
Next is Chris Watson’s contribution to Touch: Displacing, the continuing annual subscription designed to reflect and describe our current state and raise funds for the contributing artists. Chris Watson’s contribution is an extension of his ongoing exploration of mechanical sounds, a forward momentum from the “Deepcar” recording on “Touch Movements” (Folio 002, 2017) and an echo of his earlier work with Cabaret Voltaire.
Chris writes: “Bruxelles Nord, Central et Sud, a ghost station on busy tracks with no departures. Long past electromagnetic bell pulses signal the transit of nocturnal freight, the wagons battering a loaded beat through the underpass. Thalys, TGV and ICE, displaced international passengers on empty platforms, voices searching for an urban fox or lost human soul.”
Recorded in Brussels 2018. Produced in Newcastle upon Tyne November 2020
