Chris watson interview by Alan Connolly

Interview with Chris Watson 8th April 2014 17:33 42’15”

My earliest memory of sound, or the reason I like sound so much is because, when I was younger, my house has got loads of different sounds inside, it’s such an old house and there are all these ticks and clicks in the floorboards and I think it was swelling pipes. So the pipes swell and hit the wood they would do it violently and then it would calm itself down. And I think one of my earliest memories of sound is that and it would put me into that relaxed state of mind where it would slowly click down and put me to sleep in a way. So winding down. It was kind of of a therapeutic kind of sound for me. What were your childhood memories that instigated your interest in sound? I can’t honestly remember a particular moment before a time when I became interested in sound, but what really prompted it was my parents bought me a portable reel to reel taperecorder and I was either twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen, one of those three ages and it was either for a birthday present or a Christmas present. My birthday’s in late November so I can’t remember, but anyway it was that, that really set me away to what I’m doing now. Whether I’d asked for it because I’d had an awareness of sound I don’t know, I was certainly interested in electronics at the time, as a young teenager and I used to make, build, like opponent radios and things like that. I was interested in electrical sound, so sound through the radio. I used to have in my bedroom short wave radios that I’d tune in, like many kids of that age and that era, in the 1960’s. I’d just become fascinated with the sound of the world beyond where I lived and in other countries. So I had this fascination with tuning into the world, usually through short wave radios. Would you say it was more communication? No I wouldn’t say it was communication. It was sound, but it was sound presented through radios. At some point I must have said to my parents, I’d like to,it’s so transient and ephemeral this, I’d like to capture it in some way, and so I was given this gift, amazing, inspired gift of a portable reel to reel tape recorder. A National tape recorder which I’ve still got in my studio. Small, reels of 1/4 inch tape, so that was just fantastic and I investigated everything in the house with it, just as you were saying. So, I recorded our heating pipes, I recorded the sounds in the kitchen, I recorded all the doors, creaking and closing in the house, handles turning and the locks being turned and all the different rooms, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom. The sound of my mum, just go round the house, conversations with my father. So I became totally fascinated, and also, then I started to, I realised, because tape recorders are very creative tools, that you could not only record and document these sounds, you could play them back and give them a new life. You could also manipulate them, so you could turn the tape over and play them backwards, or you could speed it up or slow it down so it was remarkably tactile, and sculptural and creative and I was really opened up to this world of sound and the creative use of sound,particularly tape recordings. So that was the starting point for me. Very interesting, I guess that was more of an introduction for you and the environment and how it came about. The next few questions are more about the project that I’m doing and how what I’m doing relates to that. You might remember yesterday I showed you the Audio

Playground and also the Drip Music stuff that I’ve been working on, so that’s using the sonorous tones of water. A lot of the work I do is primarily education based. You create these workshops to teach university students, to use sound as an art form. However have you ever tried to do something similar to educate children, and if that was the case, what have you done differently and how would you go about teaching a group of children, possibly in primary education? I have worked with primary school children on a project I did recently, in Sheffield, inside the Circle of Fire. Part of the contract, part of the project was to do sound walks with people in Sheffield and do some work with schools when I chose to work with a primary school in the south side of the city so I went there for a day and I worked with them in exactly the same way as I work with everybody else because the thing I like about working with young children is they have no prejudice for sound, they are very open to explore and to innovate and to investigate, they are very creative with it. I had to alter some of my techniques so I could communicate effectively with them about what I do. I talked a lot about animal sounds, but then got them to imitate animal sounds and we went outside and did some recording. I took the bat detector and I took the contact microphone and recorded the fence around their school. Was this a full classroom of twenty to thirty kids? Yes, accompanied by several teachers. I worked actually with the whole school, all day, they were in groups of about fifteen at a time and there was maybe sixty children in the school, primary school,so they were about nine I think. It was remarkable because they don’t have any prejudice for sound so they just go straight into it. They weren’t particularly attuned to music so they were quite open to listening to sounds as music. They didn’t have any artificial barriers. I just really talked to them about sound and played them stuff, played them my recordings, played them sounds they might be familiar with, played them sound that might have been completely alien to them, but a lot of the communication was through animal sounds because children are very aware of that. A lot of people these days have them as pets, so they are aware of the sound of a dog and a cat, or the guinea-pigs or the mice. So there’s a very free and easy exchange. I just went along with them, I wasn’t trying , you know I’m not professionally qualified to teach or educate people, but everyone is interested in sound. People that I’ve found anyway, everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks of it in many different ways so I was just happy to engage with them, really went with their flow in certain dimensions. Yes, I think it’s really important now we’ve got this new technology, like the bat recorder and the contact mikes. How something as small as a fence can make such an amazing sound, for a child that must absolutely blow their mind. I think that was the key thing that I was interested to take with me was the fact that, at the end of the day they were much more aware, for a start, to the sounds of their environment, which is crucially important, It’s the first step in learning to control your sound environment, so if there was a message, it was that I’m very concerned with the

effects of noise pollution on all of us, not only on children, so I talked to them about that, and we talked about how bad the sound was in the classroom with the overhead projector whirring away constantly, poor acoustics, bad sound, poor sound insulation, which they’re all aware of. But drawing it to their attention and to their teacher’s attention, really brought it home. They then started to become much more critical of their own sonic environment. Then we went outside and listened to that, and listened to traffic noise and listened to birdsong and how you can move your location to radically change the sounds of your environment by simply, the fact that if you go further away from the road the quieter it becomes. Very obvious things to us but things that were interesting exercises for young people. Yes, they almost take it for granted a little bit until you show them. Yes, there are certain things I think are innate within us , and things that help being pointed out and you can build on. A lot of sound is experienced, experiencial so if you were being exposed to certain sounds and not others, or vice-versa. I’ve read Trevor Cox’s new book, Sonic Wonderland that I showed you yesterday and he basically states that “The remarkable thing is that in both a tidal bore and the Lazy winding creek, tiny air bubbles make sounds of frequencies where our hearing works best and physics seems just right.” He basically says that this is more than a coincidence and that perhaps our hearing has evolved specifically to discern the frequencies that are produced by running water, and if our hearing works on a different frequency wave we would be deaf to a substance vital to our survival. Can you elaborate on your findings of sonic qualities of water and maybe shed some light on the hydra-foil tool? Obviously I’ve been using that last night so I do know quite a lot about it. I’m very interested in the sounds of water, above and below the surface, and it’s a very broadband sound, all sounds of water are very rich in terms of the spectrum in terms of frequencies, so it can mask other sounds quite effectively so there are certain animals, and this may include humans, that have evolved to communicate above and around the sounds of water and particularly there is a bird called a Dipper, which lives in upland streams and rivers, in the North England in particular and it’s song it sings by the edge of running water and it sings sometimes on rocks in the middle of fast flowing streams. This is a bird that needs to audibly communicate over a very dense wide range of frequencies of running water, so it’s song has actually evolved accordingly over a long, long, long period of time. It’s song is remarkable, it cuts through the sound of running water, quite a challenge, it’s one of the few birds that have done it. There are other water birds that have taken this into account, there are other mammals that have taken it into account. There is a species of bat, the Daubenton’s Bat, which it’s common name is the Water Bat, which hunts for insects, flying above the surface of running water. Mouse Bats, or insectivorous bats anyway, use echo location, they use pulses of sound. They listen to what comes back and build up an image as we imagine based on the sounds around them. The Daubenton’s Bat uses ultrasonic echo location calls which are above the frequency of running water. So their echo location has evolved, like the song of the Dipper, to cut through it.

I’m not sure about human evolution around the sounds of water because we have the ability to move towards and away from water, we’re not tied to it, as in the same way as a Dipper is, or a Grey Wagtail or a Daubenton’s Bat, so I’m not sure how vital our communicative frequencies are locked into the frequency of water because we can simply move away, but it’s an interesting idea, but it wouldn’t explain why we have evolved to live in so many different habitats. As a result of recording by water, I often record the sounds of running water above the surface, but I’m actually particularly interested in the sounds in water, underneath the surface, for which I use hydrophones, underwater microphones. I really enjoy recording sounds and revealing sounds that would be otherwise hidden, certainly to our ears. So I record a lot in the oceans, the saltwater where sound travels almost five times faster and I’ve also done a lot of recording in freshwater, in lakes and rivers and pools and lagoons, in all sorts of places, continually fascinated by that and I think that’s something to do with the harmonic content of sounds in water and places like that. I think it’s because, and this is a long shot, when we first start to hear, we’re sixteen weeks old in our mother’s womb, that’s when our hearing develops, as a foetus - sixteen weeks old, so we hear sounds for many weeks until we are born, in our mother’s womb through the amniotic fluid. So we are experiencing the sounds of the world through a fluid before we are born and then we are born into a world of changing air pressure sounds . I made a radio program a few years ago about tranquility and what it is and if it’s a place or a state of mind and one thing that convinced me making that program was that the things that people describe as tranquil are things that have a low dynamic range and a very rich harmonic content. Waves washing on a beach, wind through trees, the wind through a reed bed, you know sort of sighing leaves, sounds like that. Harmonic, lots of different frequencies but not massively dynamic. In other words, not dissimilar at all to the way we hear sound before we’re born. So, I think one reason we find underwater sounds so sort of magnetic and potentially attractive, I think, is possibly because we are so thinking of how we heard sound before we were born, so you see it’s quite a deep psychological place to go. I think that’s really interesting how you hear through a fluid before you were born. Don’t you think that would make the internal world of the mother seem really loud so that when you’re born, you are exposed to the sounds coming through the air, you’d be coming to somewhere more silent? No, I think it’s the other way round. The sounds through that fluid, although it’s quite dense and would probably propagate sounds, it also insulates you from high frequencies certainly. So you hear more mid and low frequencies, but I think, I don’t know, but you are suddenly exposed to a much greater dynamic range. You hear and it must be a real shock, to transform that sense - I know you’ve got vision and things like that and smell, and tactile senses but suddenly to be born into that world of sound must be astonishing. So I’ve always been interested in sound, in freshwater and seawater because it’s such an efficient medium for sound to profligate.

I’ve been studying non-graphic scores as a way of making visuals to represent sound. Have you ever made a graphic score or allowed people to interpret your work visually or do you think this distracts from the sonorous experience? I normally create a score for my pieces, my installation pieces, which can be anything from notes to sketches to objects or to words so I create what you could loosely call it a collage which I then use as a score, which I carry with me and keep in my head so I can recall it constantly and I also hear it as well like a lot of composers I guess. I imagine how I want it to sound and that’s how the narrative develops as well. My work, generally has a narrative so I quite often use maps, map scores, or create a score, using shapes. Could you perhaps draw a map of a rough outline of how you would do it? Well there’s one piece comes to mind in particular. I worked on a piece with the artist Alec Finley and he had this idea for a piece called siren, which was based around the song by a famous artist called Tim Buckley, ‘Song to the Siren’, and he wanted two people to sing to each other, and they would sing these words to start with “Here I am, waiting to hold you” but, the irony of it was, they couldn’t hear each other, but they were singing to each other. So the place we chose to film this was an old pier into the harbour and the two singers, male and female would be at either end of the pier at high tide and this is too far, even with a singing voice to be heard, it’s a couple of hundred metres. So with the sound of the sea swell and the other sounds around them they could sing these songs but they couldn’t hear each other and so, there’s a plan view, they were singing and I was to record this process, so I chose to come out with the lifeboat captain in a boat who then rode me between these two points, like that, so it’s very similar to the score piece, so they would start to sing and I’d be rode out and I had a microphone recorder mounted on the boat and we would approach this singer with the microphone. The lifeboat captain, who was piloting the boat, didn’t stop, his instructions were not to stop. We sailed out, we rode out to here and when I got the sound of the ocean, and then at some point this person came on mike, I started to hear them, and then they got quite close, and then the captain kept on rowing. I kept the microphone oriented in the same way, so I heard them and then about there it cut off and there it picked up. We heard the singer again only till we got about here and then we heard the other singer, Maria singing and then we lost Maria there and picked Clive up again here. So we had this cycle of song, so we had this score which was concentric circles which was the sound radiating out. That was the piece and I did quite a bit of postproduction on it where we go underwater at some point. Do you think making a graphic score like that is better than doing it as a five line stave? Yes, I can’t write music. I’ve no interest in that from that point of view, but that’s perfect for me. Do you think that children are put off by that, the systematic five line stave,how regimented it is? I know it’s got it’s purpose and it’s place but I think if you were to give that to someone, they’re not going to be too intimidated by it. Yes, that’s a really good question. I mean written music is for a very particular purpose, it’s not for everybody. I just picked this up intuitively working with other artists and working with

people like Alec Finley who is brilliant and very good and so part of the exchange of ideas we drew notes like this to start with and then we’d build on it and use that in the piece and that became the score and so I don’t think you can substitute it with a conventional musical score. It would serve no purpose because the behaviour of the actions are also crucial to it and you can impart that through that kind of graphic score. In the same way, I was really interested to look at your book last night, there is some fantastic potential in that with the graphic scores. It reminded me a little bit of a friend of mine’s work Geoff Riland- French ,who has photographic scores. They are photographs of places which are then interpreted, but I found that book very engaging, the Audio Playground and intuitive. For me it’s like the Oblique Strategy Cards by Brian Eno. It’s something you can look through and make music from whenever. It’s that kind of engagement, a graphic score engagement. It’s not, read like this, it’s maybe read it like that and pick a page, maybe use the other books. Thanks for your input on that, I really appreciate you saying how good it is. Do you feel your work is just documentation for posterity for future generations, or is it to educate people to the diversity of sound in the natural world? The documentation of my work is important because it is the sound of places, and it’s the sound of places at particular times, some of which have passed into history. So we’ve got recordings of places such as Brighton Pier, the west pier, which was mysteriously burnt down in several arson attacks. I’ve got recordings of the starlings roust on that which has now gone. So as a piece of documentation, sounds like that are vital because they have passed into history, so I’m very conscious of that. But that’s not why I make recordings. I do go out and document some places but it’s not usually the prime reason for going out. It’s usually for commissioned work, or I have an idea or I’m simply inspired to go somewhere and so until that goes beyond documentation I want to work with those sounds creatively, not just archive them and file them away in a library system. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s important that that’s done. Places like the British Library, the National Sound Archives, they are vital components of their work. It’s not the reason why I record. I record because I really love going out and capturing the sounds of these places and then working with them in many different ways which is the great thing about sound, whether it’s a feature film, a radio drama or a sound installation. Actually my techniques are very similar but the end result can be very different. I chose to spend three hours in your project Hy Brasil which I enjoyed. When I entered the exhibition I thought it was quiet for an exhibition on sound. However, after about half an hour, it seemed to be getting louder. My hearing must have become more sensitive because I came out more aware of everything around me. Even buses and traffic was more monstrous. It was almost like listening had been reinvented. Was this an intentional, temporary souvenir for the participant, or was it just kind of a coincidence that being exposed to something for that long has that kind of adverse effect on you? That’s really interesting. I’m glad, I’m really pleased that you went in to it for that length of time because it was a very much, durational piece of work. What’s crucial about presentation of any sound work, whether it’s a feature film or a radio drama or an installation in the Howard Assembly Room is the level at which it’s presented. It’s very easy these days with the power and technology that we’ve got, to play things too loud and that completely destroys the effect, breaks the spell of the piece I’ve found through experience. So I try to be really careful with levels and it’s all comparative as well, particularly with a piece like Hy Brasil which is underwater and then above the water on the surface, on the beach and

ends up on a mountain top. But from what I’ve found from sound through experience, the best level to appreciate, or to engage with any sound work, and which is very simple with my work because it’s location work mostly, is to play it at the level you’d experience it at in reality. It’s really easy to turn stuff up and to project and blast people with sound, but our ears and brains are very good at telling us that that is just too loud and disengaging with it. The piece, like all the pieces, I wanted to engage people in the piece, get them to listen to it, so one effect of doing that is to play it at the right levels so people have to listen, they become quiet, stop their conversations and they start to listen to it. Then you can still introduce dynamics, but the level has to be very crucially assessed before you start. I go to great lengths to tell Myah, who does all the special effects for the sound for those pieces to accomplish that. So, you’re right when you go outside, all of a sudden you’ve maybe had your ears cleansed, you go outside and you hear how bad the real world is. We tune a lot of it out but it is still a very power hungry process. You were in a band when you were roughly our age. What kind of instrument did you play, was it a synthesizer? Yes, I was in a band called Cabaret Voltaire from the late 1970’s or the mid 1970’s or even the early 1970’s to the early 1980’s and we were mostly electronic music, not exclusively though. Base guitar, vocals keyboard, sometimes a drummer, lots of electronics. Three of us were from Sheffield, so we lived there, we were born there, brought up there and we used it as the medium of expression of our age. I was in the band from sort of my late teens to being about twenty seven. Obviously, you kind of were a musician before you started documenting sound is that right? No, I was recording before I was in the band. It was recording that got me interested in music, Musique Concrete and particularly the work of Pierre Schaeffer in France in the late 1940’s early 1950’s. It was the tape recorder that got me involved with music, and then later, electronics. I was listening to some of Pierre’s stuff yesterday and there is one he does with a train. Etude Aux Chemins de Fer. Yes, I think that’s it. I briefly watched it and yesterday you played your recording of the train. When you were on the train for as long as you were were you thinking of what he did and did that influence you? Yes, certainly. If you get the album. It’s dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, It’s in honour of him. He’s not just influenced me, loads of people. I mean, trains have great rhythm, ready made music, the rhythm of the railways. It’s powerful, it’s creative, it’s inspiring. I like train tracks, most people do. I like the sound of trains and everything about them. The sense of speed and rhythms and timbres. They are very musical, mechanical devises so I’m not surprised Schaeffer chose them. Not surprised, living on a train for five weeks, how much I enjoyed it and other people have done it and other people have done it, like Peter Hamford to Kraftwerk have used the sounds of trains. Well I was thinking about that piece you played yesterday as well, The Cheetah, purring and that had a nice rhythm to it as well. That was something amazing and something you wouldn’t hear, well you very rarely get the chance to be so close to a cheetah in any case, but to pick up that animal rhythm was such a powerful sound, it was great.

Do you ever get worried about your own safety when you’re recording certain animals? Well I’m careful, not stupid and I work a lot with the scientific community, or naturalists, ranges of people like that. In this country you’re pretty much okay, unless you go onto the moors in summer and get bit by an adder, which can happen. But in places like Africa and South America, some places in Australia can be dangerous places and it’s very easy if focussed on one thing to forget where you are or your surroundings, so I pay careful attention to what I’m told and I look after myself and I’m aware and try to keep one ear and one eye on the open environment as well. It’s no good getting killed and animals like that are not out to get you, but they are not forgiving either. You need to be aware, and most of it’s common sense. You don’t put yourself in hostile situations. I mean, sometimes you have to, to a certain extent, but you need to be careful and aware. You can obviously get amazing results without having to do that. Like you said, when you did the turkey carcass in your own garden and then you scaled it up to the vultures. You had obviously learnt that technique and that meant you didn’t have to go anywhere near. Yes, the process, Fieldcraft is the term for it and so you can’t get it out of a book, you have to get out there and experience it. It’s like today, freezing to death on that canal side. The wind howling underneath that railway bridge. That’s the point where you decide you quite enjoy it or you hate it I’m much better off working with files in a studio rather than going out captured my own material,because it’s just a challenging environment. This country might not be dangerous from animals but from a weather point of view it can be pretty hardcore. Is there any further advice that you’d give me to pursue and get into what you do? I think you’re doing okay, you just need to stay focussed in what you’re interested in and follow your nose. That’s what I’ve done and that’s really broadened my horizons with who I get to work with, radio programs, feature films, installations. That’s the great thing in the power sound house, it allows you to relocate yourself as well as your work across lots of different mediums. You seem to be doing a really good job doing that. I know it’s going to seem really cheeky, but is there anything I can get involved with you in future projects? I’ve not got much I’m doing in this country at the moment. I’m doing a big installation in Kielder Forest next October which may require a few people to come along and help, so you’d be welcome to come along and help. I’d really love to. Well, It’s being commissioned and produced professionally, but if you’re interested

i’ll certainly put you down. Would I be able to get your email as well? Yes sure, I’ll write it down Thanks Your writing is really fluid. I love it but would you be able to say it just so I can have it on here. (I have omitted Chris email for privacy reasons) Brilliant, if you could keep me in mind for that project because when I come out of uni I feel , like I was saying last night, Alan Dunn does his Fine Art and he’s a good contact for them and he’s obviously going to be a good contact for me but I haven’t got that much guidance with the tutors on my course so it’s really fortunate for me and I don’t want to waste that. Yes, I understand. At the very least I can put you in touch with a technical manager who sets these things up. If you want to investigate it, go to jerwood@openforest and look there, you’ll see the commission, it’s called Hrafn. That’s onomatopoeic it’s the old norse for raven. Hrafn, that’s what they say and it’s the sound for a translation for a raven roost in Kielder Forest where there are no ravens. But, we’re going to bring the sound of hundreds of them back to the forest canopy and do a big installation. I’ll keep you posted. It’ll be in Kielder Forest at the end of October, but prior to that there’ll be some rigging. We’ve got professional tree climbers involved rigging speakers in the tree canopy in a big sort of elipse. I’d really love to be involved. Drop me a line. So will that be in October. End of October, Kielder Forest, Northumberland. But if you go to that website you’ll see it and keep in touch. http://jerwoodopenforest.org/

Chris Watsons Graphic Score