chris watson: weather report

2012 repress. originally issued in 2003. 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 weather has created and shaped all our habitats. Clearly, it also has a profound and dynamic effect upon our lives and that of other animals. The three locations featured here -- Kenya's Masai Mara, a Scottish highland glen and an Icelandic glacier -- 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. This is Chris' first foray into composition using his location recordings of wildlife and habitats -- in his previous releases, he was concerned with describing and revealing the special atmosphere of a place by site-specific, untreated location recordings. On Weather Report, he constructs collages of sounds, which evolve from a series of recordings made at the specific locations over varying periods of time, distilling vast, diverse arenas of sound into pointillistic sound-poems. As Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in Time Out New York in 1999: "Listen to your world. It may be more interesting than all the things you buy to escape from it.