Chris Watson
A former & founding member of Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Chris Watson is currently a sound recordist specializing in a variety of nature-related subjects. He has worked on numerous TV and radio documentaries for BBC, as well as other projects. In addition, he has also released a number of solo and collaborative CDs, generally on the Touch label, which are derived from his location recordings.
A former & founding member of Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Chris Watson is currently a sound recordist specializing in a variety of nature-related subjects. He has worked on numerous TV and radio documentaries for BBC, as well as other projects. In addition, he has also released a number of solo and collaborative CDs, generally on the Touch label, which are derived from his location recordings.
Oxmardyke
Philip Jeck sadly passed away at the end of March 2022. But before he died, he was able to work on some audio files sent to him by Chris Watson, who writes: "In 2017 I was recording along the north bank of the Humber estuary and one morning driving back from Faxfleet I was stopped at the Oxmardyke rail crossing. The gates were down. After setting up a microphone array by the tracks for a passing freight train the signalman shouted an invitation to climb up into the gate box to make some more rec…
Subaerial
'Subaerial' is the latest and most sophisticated transmission from the long musical partnership of cellist Lucy Railton and keyboardist Kit Downes, a collaborative history that stretches back thirteen years. From the beginning, the pair bridged musical worlds, with the former emerging from classical and contemporary music and the latter steeped in jazz tradition.
Exploratory I and II
This bundle includes Phill Niblock's Exploratory I and Exploratory II LPs released by Matière Mémoire. Records come, respectively, on transparent and clear red vinyl and are limited to 300 copies each.Matière Mémoire has the honor to present to you the new masterful work of Phill Niblock: Exploratory. One of the most beautiful and powerful works that Phill Niblock has ever offered to us! Phill reinvents and probes the oceans of drone music possibilities deeper than ever. This piece has been per…
Exploratory I
**Edition of 300 copies on clear Vinyl.** Matiere Memoire has the honor to present to you the new masterful work of Phill Niblock: Exploratory. One of the most beautiful and powerful works that Phill Niblock has ever offered to us! Phill reinvents and probes the oceans of drone music possibilities deeper than ever. This piece has been performed and recorded for over a year by many great musicians around the world, under the supervision and direction of Phill. Arditti String Quartet, David Watson…
Tin Star Liverpool
* Edition of 300 neon yellow vinyl * Adrian Corker’s bold, heavily textured score for Tin Star: Liverpool gets a limited release on 300 neon yellow vinyl. Working with a 12-piece string section as well as brass and percussion, Corker draws out a rich palette of volatile sonics Analogue tape processing help re-shape things further, slowing and stretching the sound giving rise to unusual shapes and colours. And woven amongst all this are field recordings by Corker and Chris Watson, recorded aroun…
Notes From The Forest Floor / Line Of Parts
* Edition of 250 on clear vinyl * A split sided album with Chris Watson and Georgia Rodgers, pairing two artists whose works here show different but complimentary new forms in the use of field recording in composition. Both were originally multi-channel installations before the release of these stereo versions.
Locations, Processed (Blue TB7 Series) LP
Chris Watson, originally the keyboard player of Cabaret Voltaire, then a sound recordist for Tyne Tees Television and founder member of The Hafler Trio, is now perhaps best known for his BAFTA-winning location recording for David Attenborough, Birdwatch, Tweet Of The Day, and range of BBC Radio programs. Here, Chris creates an all new sound journey in honor of Bob Moog via a series of his own location recordings, subtlety processed through The Moog Sound Lab's System 55. Almost a return to the p…
In St Cuthbert's Time
The Sounds of Lindisfarne and the Gospels. To celebrate the exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at Durham Cathedral from July to September 2013, awardÐwinning wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson has researched the sonic environment of the Holy Island as it might have been experienced by St Cuthbert in 700 A.D. 'A 7th Century Soundscape of Lindisfarne. Throughout human history artists have been influenced by their surroundings and the sounds of the landscape they inhabit. When Eadfrith, the B…
El Tren Fantasma - The Signal Man's Mix
A 12' Vinyl with two remixed tracks from the CD "We know Chris Watson mostly from his works dealing with sounds from nature, animal wild life and stormy weather. A decade ago he worked as a sound recordist for the BBC who were doing a documentary on the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico, a train company with a trail from Los Mochis to Veracruz, coast to coast, through cities and wild life. All of that sound material is now used in 'El tren Fantasma', the ghost train (since it no longer ex…
El tren fantasma
"Take the ghost train from Los Mochis to Veracruz and travel cross country, coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic. Ride the rhythm of the rails on board the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (FNM) and the music of a journey that has now passed into history." El Tren Fantasma, (The Ghost Train), is Chris Watson's 4th solo album for Touch, and his first since Weather Report in 2003, which was named as one of the albums you should hear before you die in The Guardian. A Radio programme was br…
Cross-Pollination
Plenty of praise has been lavished on veteran musician, field recording expert and BBC sound recordist Chris Watson, and it would be hard to disagree with any of it. 'Cross Pollination' is his latest full-length, again for the Touch label that has been his home for many years, and sees him teaming up with Marcus Davidson for a surprising collaborative piece. Using Watson's recordings of bees in an English country garden as the backbone of the composition, Marcus Davidson had a choir re-interpret…
Stepping Into The Dark
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 Northumber…
Oceanus Pacificus
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.
Number one
American performance/noise/percussion artist Z'ev, Japanese composer/performer K.K. Null, and field-recording artist Chris Watson (formerly of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio) conjoin in a first collaboration for Touch. The idea for this recording, generated by Z'ev, has three elements: 1) to use the structure of the Noh Theatre cycle as the basis for the composition; 2) to consider the initial sound development in terms of developing "characters" which would then interact with one another …
Storm
1. Chris Watson - No Man's Land. Late October on the strands of Budle Bay where dense layers of transient alien voices are swamped by a full moon tide creeping across the island's silver causeway. Now lapping out of the gathering gloom an immersive sea wash is filling then draining away carrying slow currents from here to another place. There are no reference points in this darkness. Glimmer dawn in the gaping mouth of a sea cave below Tarbet Gulley where the siren songs of Cromarty, Forth & Tyn…
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 weathe…
Outside the circle of fire
The purr of a leopard close up against a baobab tree, waiting. Whales surfacing, breathing in cold air. Coll starling imitate the noise of farm machinery from the hollow ring of a ruined bothy. The rattle of wood over a black stream... Chris Watson's second CD is a dramatic contrast to the spacious atmospheres of "Stepping into the Dark" (touch TO:27, 1996). Featuring 22 close-up recordings of animals, birds and insect life, "Outside the Circle of Fire" enlarges our awareness of the sound univer…