Chris Watson: Weather Report

After leaving the experimental electronic group Cabaret Voltaire in late 1981 for a job as a sound engineer for television and then a several years tenure another unusual group, The Hafler Trio, Chris Watson settled in to his ongoing avocation as a sound recordist working primarily with natural environments, including with Sir Richard Attenborough on televised nature programs that took him throughout the world.  In the mid-1990s, Watson began recording albums of natural environments with this work usually issued by Jon Wozencroft's Touch label, with one of these, Outside the Circle of Fire, highlighted here before. Using high-quality field recording equipment and placing them and him in extraordinary and varied locations has given Watson the opportunity to capture fascinating sound worlds relating to animals of all kinds, wind, water and other elements.  Edited judiciously, these albums are incredibly immersive, especially on decent headphones, and, at least to this admirer, musical, with all kinds of natural rhythms, harmonies and melodies. 

Whether it is defined as "music" is obviously left to the listener, but Weather Report, released in 2003 is a remarkable aural journey and experience with three 18-minute tracks taking us to the Masai Mara region of Kenya in east Africa, a glen in the Scottish highlands, and the amazing moving of the ice in and weather and animal sounds around an Icelandic glacier.  A brief statement by Watson observes that "the weather has created and shaped all our habitats.  Clearly it also has profound and dynamic effect upon our lives and that of other animals.  The three locations featured here 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."  Watson's work is a reminder that, just as it is a good idea to occasionally take our focus off our earthbound existence and look up and ponder the wonder of the universe, it is equally important to reduce our sense of listening of music to first principles--the basic organization of sound.  Rain, the cries of birds, wind, the chirping of insects, and much else are elements of primeval music and our abstracting ourselves from our environment leads to a false and, when it comes to climate change, dangerous impression that humans are somehow removed in a privileged realm from other forms of life.