Browse by Artist: WATSON, CHRIS

Artist:	WATSON, CHRIS
Title:	Stepping Into The Dark
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TO 027CD

1996 release, repressed! "Watson's lead instrument is the tape recorder. After working with Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, he became sound recordist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He has since joined a film and video production company, working for BBC wildlife documentaries and occasional feature films. The 12 recordings on Stepping into the Dark contrast a windswept forest in Glen Cannich with the gathering conversations of rooks roosting in a churchyard in Northumberland. Other atmospheres include the heat and wall of sound found on the River Mara in Kenya, fishing bats on a mangrove pool in Venezuela, the ritual dance of snipe at dusk in the Northern Hebrides... a hydrophone at 5m. depth in the Moray Firth captures the signature whistles and clicks of bottlenose dolphins."

Artist:	WATSON, CHRIS
Title:	Outside the Circle of Fire
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TO 037CD

"Chris Watson's second CD is a dramatic contrast to the spacious atmospheres of Stepping into the Dark (Touch 27, 1996). Featuring 22 close-up recordings of animals, birds and insect life, Outside the Circle of Fire enlarges our awareness of the sound universe, intimate with voices from the past. There is an intensity here that television pictures cannot conjure. These are the sounds of secret languages, particular events that have been recorded as close up as possible to try and reveal something of their individual beauty, rhythm, eloquence and sheer power. Several of the sounds would be inaudible or radically degraded more than a few meters from the animal. Yet others collectively use the acoustics of their habitat to modulate the message. They exist, however, whether we hear them or not -- close up details of signals that are beyond our reach outside the circle of fire."

Artist:	WATSON, CHRIS
Title:	Weather Report
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TO 047CD

Repressing of Chris Watson's critically-acclaimed 2003 release, Weather Report. After working with Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Watson became a sound recordist for the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He has since joined a film and video production company, working for BBC wildlife documentaries and occasional feature films. It is with this naturalist spirit and background that Watson applies his work, capturing sound footage that illustrates a deep understanding of silence, space, and ecological wonderment. Weather Report understands that the weather has created and shaped all our habitats. Clearly, it also has a profound and dynamic effect upon our lives and that of other animals. The three locations featured here -- Kenya's Masai Mara, a Scottish highland glen and an Icelandic glacier -- all have moods and characters which are made tangible by the elements, and these periodic events are represented within by a form of time compression. This is Chris' first foray into composition using his location recordings of wildlife and habitats -- in his previous releases, he was concerned with describing and revealing the special atmosphere of a place by site-specific, untreated location recordings. On Weather Report, he constructs collages of sounds, which evolve from a series of recordings made at the specific locations over varying periods of time, distilling vast, diverse arenas of sound into pointillistic sound-poems. As Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in Time Out New York in 1999: "Listen to your world. It may be more interesting than all the things you buy to escape from it."

Artist:	WATSON, CHRIS
Title:	Oceanus Pacificus
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	7"
Price:	$7.00
Catalog #:	TS 002EP

Chris Watson is the world's leading wildlife sound recordist. Oceanus Pacificus captures the voices and rhythms of the Humboldt current around the Galapagos Islands recorded in April 2006 using a pair of Dolphin Ear Pro Hydrophones onto a NAGRA ARES-PII digital audio recorder. After co-founding Cabaret Voltaire and playing in The Hafler Trio, he left all of it to become the sound archivist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He is now a full-time freelance sound recordist.

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