Chris Watson - Weather Report
Chris Watson, once part of Caberet Voltaire and The Halfer Trio, has taken his microphones and recorders and vanished into the wilderness. Since parting ways with experimental electronic music, Watson has been capturing the sonics of the natural world as a sound recorder for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. His records and contributions to compilations have been slices of elemental life, usually involving patterns of wind and animal sounds. His work teeters on the edge of the eternal dicusssion: what, exactly, qualifies as music? If you bring in Brian Eno's moment of clarity when he realized exactly what "ambient music" was (music intended to be present but ignored), the definition gets even harder to pin down.
One can argue that the presence of a composer is necessary for a work to be considered music. Unlike other field recordings that he has done, Watson actually compresses the time duration of the recordings in Weather Report down to eighteen minutes. These three pieces aren't accurate renderings of spacial environments; they have become artistic interpretations -- encapsulated snapshots of time and space. Is it pop music? Certainly not. Is it an ambient soundtrack which colors and transforms your local space into something else? Definitely.
For eighteen minutes, I'm lost on the African plain of Masai Mara. There are lions coughing in the foreground, a group of Masai pass before the rainfall and even the deluge which spatters the ground with fat drops can't hide the natural course of prey and predator which passes across the face of Watson's mikes. "Ol-Olool-O" moves from hot summer day to late afternoon thundershower to the muggy cicada chorus of the humid evening. I'm a city dweller, locked into passages of concrete, rebar and chrome. I yearn for the jungles and the veldts. For eighteen minutes, I get to spend a day in Africa. This isn't ambient music; this is active participation in some other place.
The liner notes of Weather Report are a succint mission statement: "The weather has created and shaped all our habitats. Clearly it has also had a 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 these elements, and these periodic events are represented within by a form of time compression."
While "Ol-Olool-O" compressed fourteen hours, "The Lapaich" summarizes four months of the shifting environments of a Scottish glen as the year moves from autumn into winter. Water rushes over dark rocks, a cascading river which has filled and jumped the narrow spring bed. Several varities of bird make noise from the overhanging branches. Time shifts and the ruddy banks of the river become dry and the winds begin to howl across the empty stones. The bird noises change as the summer dwellers vanish into the south and all that remains are the hardier birds, the artic avians who ride the cold drafts. As winter progresses, the sounds die away: the winds vanish and the birds roost elsewhere. Eventually, all that you are left with is the subtle sound of seasonal creep.
Glacial creep is the time frame for the final aural journey. "Vatnajökull" is the 10,000 year journey of ice formed within the dark interior of an Icelandic glacier as it slowly -- oh so slowly -- crawls into the Norwegian Sea. You are submerged into the groaning, creaking subterranean pit of blue-black darkness and the endless pressure of ice against ice sounds like nothing more than the creaking of ancient wood. At some point, all this compression starts a hallucination in your brain, an imagined moaning of a spectral wind as if there was breath being forced between the ice crystals of this immense glacier. Something moves in the water beside you and you can't stop the thought racing in your head: how can there be free-standing water inside a block of frozen ice? By the time a mammoth piece calves off into the ocean and the echo of its impact reaches you, your hallucinations and mental perambulations have formed music -- woodwinds blown by errant creatures who exist as barely more than a breath of cold air. The ice spits you out finally, your oubliette of impacted snow suddenly rupturing and spilling you out onto the tempestuous seas. There, lying sprawled on a flat iceberg slowly turning away from the thundering edge of the fragmenting glacier, you are discovered by the wildlife which thrives at the edge of the white cliff. The terns and the eider ducks wheel and plume over you, squawking and shouting at your sudden appearance. Seals surface nearby in surprise, blowing water and air across you in a fine spray of seal mucus and expelled water. The sun is hot above you; the ice cold beneath you. You have been born from icy darkness.
As much as I love seeing the weather, I enjoy hearing it more which isn't terribly surprising for an aurally oriented child such as myself. Eno's ephiphany on the nature of musical environments is the only hard and fast rule by which I listen: what you hear has an impact on your environment and on you. I can change everything by changing the music. Chris Watson's Weather Report is my cheap getaway vacation: I can change my location without moving from my seat. This is a virtual travelogue to exotic places untouched by the din of the urban landscape.
Chris Watson
Touch [2003]
music
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