Chris Watson has long been aware of the link between sound and memory. “I can play back a recording I made last year or 10 years ago and within seconds I know where it is, what I was doing, how I felt, what the equipment was like and what the weather was like,” he tells me.
But in his five-decade career, the 70-year-old sound artist has rarely taken a more extensive trip down memory lane than in his upcoming multimedia project with the Manchester Collective.
That project is Weather, which — in addition to film footage and a performance of a post-minimalist orchestral composition by American composer Michael Gordon — will include decades’ worth of Watson’s field recordings. We’ll hear sounds from the Amber Mountain rainforest in Madagascar, from the Namib desert in southern Africa, from the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland, which Watson has been visiting for 20 years.
We’ll even hear the sounds of a place that no longer exists: the medieval city of Dunwich — once a major port on the Suffolk coast that was hit by storms in the 13th century and is now largely below the sea. Speaking to me over Zoom, Watson shares an anecdote from his visit to the surrounding area: “This fisherman told me that [according to local legend], you can tell when the weather is changing because the bells of Dunwich [churches] start tolling from the deep. That really caught my imagination and I decided to use that sound. But of course I had to cheat: I recorded the bells of York Minster, and made them sound like they were coming from the ocean floor.”
The purpose of Weather, which premieres at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and London’s Southbank Centre this month, is to profile the extent of climate change, through an immersive presentation of endangered habitats and lost places. But with so many constituent elements, will it all hang together? Watson assures me that Carlos Casas’s film, featuring visual footage of the habitats we will hear, is intended to work in tandem with his soundscapes. As will Gordon’s composition, Weather, which gives the whole project its name.
“I like the ambient sounds in Gordon’s piece — sirens and thunder. They convey a sense of warning. And like all good music,” says Watson, “his score leaves spaces to listen to other sounds, so my recordings can become part of the composition, but also something new, something different.”
As someone who has witnessed the effects of climate change at first hand — “In the time I’ve been visiting the Icelandic glacier I’ve seen it retreat by 200 metres” — Watson is better qualified than many to share his feelings about it. But he has no desire to preach to the choir. “I think we’re all made sufficiently aware of what’s happening [with the environment],” he tells me. “And in any case, this project isn’t a lecture, it’s a piece of theatre. I’ve chosen [to spotlight] these places because they’re sonically rich.”
Accordingly, he has gone so far as to include in the work some sounds that would remain inaudible without specialist equipment. “There’s a point in the glacier’s journey, if you listen with underwater microphones, you can hear the ice melting and the air inside it popping out. This is air that has been trapped for 10,000 years being re-released back into our atmosphere. It sounds like a tiny xylophone, with all these very musical, percussive elements. I thought it was a magical process.”
Taking pleasure in sound for sound’s sake is something of a sacred principle for Watson, who has many times expressed his desire to “put his audience where his microphones are”. And it’s a principle that has taken him a long way. He has worked all over the globe on projects ranging from Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for the hit HBO TV series Chernobyl to David Attenborough’s wildlife programmes.
A typical day in his life might include coming face to face with alligators, eavesdropping on spider monkeys or recording the mating call of the blue whale in surround-sound. He has spent so much time on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts that he is convinced he can tell them apart by sound: “Everywhere I’ve been in the Pacific has this soft deep harmonic pull of currents, while the Atlantic tends to sound harder.” Yet Watson’s journey into the world of sound art started on his own doorstep: in the Derbyshire countryside.
He was 12 when he first ventured out to record the sounds of “the skylarks and golden plovers, the wind over the rocks and the rain”. From the outset he saw the creative potential of his tape recorder “not just as a device for documenting sounds, but in a wider sense because [sound] is so tactile: you can sculpt it, you can pick it up, you can play it backwards, you can cut and splice it and cut it into chunks.” But it was in his late teens, when he discovered musique concrète (“grown-ups making music with tape recorders like I had”), that he saw the potential of turning his passion into a profession.
Five decades on, he remains convinced that location sound can unlock a sense of time and place (“that atmosphere you feel when you walk into a house or a flat”). That, he says, is because “sound is visceral. It takes you back instantly. It strikes directly into our hearts and imagination.” Would he put it on a par with a piece of composed music? Yes, he says, though the sounds of the world around us can be even more personal to the listener: “I’ve still got the first sound my daughter made when she was born. I’ve got the sound of my parents, who are long since deceased, talking, which I find really . . . in fact I just can’t listen to it. It’s very powerful.”
He credits evolution with giving humankind this particularly heightened sensitivity to sound (“The people who didn’t hear predators in their sleep 40,000 years ago would have come to an evolutionary dead end very quickly”). Yet, he says, it’s a gift that many of us have forgotten how to use. “We often ignore the [sound of our environment] because we’re surrounded by so much noise pollution.”
His solution has been to practise listening to everyday sounds as well as unusual ones, to the point where he finds it hard to switch off. “I’ll be out on a walk with Maggie, my wife, saying ‘black cap, willow warbler, chiffchaff’. It’s like some form of Tourette’s, where I have to name the sound that I’m listening to.” In a similar vein, he encourages his grandson to make up stories based on sounds recorded on walks around his local area.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in there for all of us? Watson seems to think so. “You don’t have to go to the other side of the planet to hear the most extraordinary wildlife sounds. You can just go into your garden or your local park or simply put your head out of your bedroom window.”
He concludes: “Even though we hear everything, we don’t tend to listen. But if you open your ears, you will get so much information about the simplest places. And you will get enormous pleasure from it.”
Manchester, September 23, rncm.ac.uk; London, September 24, southbankcentre.co.uk
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