After starting out on the punk and industrial scene, the Englishman Chris Watson has become one of the great figures of field recording. Half-naturalist, half-spiritualist, he seeks, with extreme sonic precision, to capture the spirit of places as much as the multiple layers of history, the sometimes invisible symphony of the elements as much as the murmur of lost presences.

Music without instruments
For his 14th birthday in 1966, young Chris Watson received a shocking gift: a portable tape recorder with which he immediately began to experiment. The Sheffield teenager became fascinated with composers who made music from fixed sounds, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer's famous Étude pour chemins de fer (1948) fascinated him because it perfectly expresses what he now calls (in this fascinating interview) the 'heartbeat-like subliminal message of the sounds, and rhythms, of trains'. This 'subliminal message', this spirit of things, of beings and especially ofplaces, he has spent his life trying to capture.

Around 1973, he embarked on the Cabaret Voltaire adventure with the late Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder. The initial idea of the trio was to produce "music withoutmusical instruments". Following the example of Fluxus in the art world, its musicians seek a creative spontaneity very influenced by the Dada movement (as evidenced by the name they have chosen for themselves), which they express with a shaggy, barbed, distorted sonic actionism (the albums Mix-up and Three Mantras, the reissues of the first demos, Attic Tapes). Starting with a few bold artistic jokes - such as concerts using portable tape recorders in public toilets or terrorist broadcasts from sound systems installed on the roof of a car -, Cabaret Voltaire became a symbol of noise and experimentation from the punk years onwards, alongside the famous "crushers of civilisation" from London, Throbbing Gristle. With his field recordings andfound sounds that he injected into their records and concerts, Watson imposed a stowaway in the combinatory universe of music: pure, uncontrolled matter. In 1981, as the band affirmed its turn towards pop and dance, Watson left it to - after a spell with the Hafler Trio, the electroacoustic project of musician Andrew M. McKenzie- devote himself fully to his original passion: field recording. 

• 

• 

• 

He then moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to take advantage of the vast spaces of the Nothumberland countryside and to explore sound, sounds, each sound in all its arcana, in its efflorescence, its disappearance, its life, its mystery. He quotes John Cage: "The world has enough music already. Leaving Cabaret Voltaire will simply have allowed Chris Watson to infinitely expand the space of his observation of sounds. The air and all the beings that depend on it, the water and the seabed with the hydrophones, the internal vibration of things that we capture with micro-contacts. The planet becomes his garden. He then began a career as a boom operator specialising in animal documentaries, which led him to work for the BBC4, National Geographic and David Attenborough's famous Life series. 

Spirits and places
Since the 1990s, Watson has also been working on an important artistic project that has been released on the English label Touch. As Time-Out journalist Sasha Frere-Jones has written, he proposes to'listen to the world' rather than trying to escape it. 

Strongly influenced by the work of the parapsychologist Thomas Lethbridge and the essayist Alfred Watkins (a great surveyor of England, inventor of the light meter, who theorised from his observations the existence of a vast network of disappeared roads, of erased 'lines', dating from before the Roman occupation), Watson seeks to flush out the unspeakable memory of places, the auditory traces of events that would have marked them with their seal, their more or less metaphorical ghosts (there is a sound design project based on his recordings called Haunted Spaces). 

Does a place called Bloody Bush or Murder Rock, for example, contain audible remnants of the past that gave it such a reputation? And, in a more ordinary way, when we visit a flat or a house, we can sometimes feel an atmosphere that attracts or repels us. Does this atmosphere have a sound signature? Can it be trapped? The habitat, animal or human, current or ancient, is one of his obsessions. His first album, Stepping into the Dark (1996), proposes such captures of almost intangible objects, spread out in various places chosen according to his personal psycho-geography. He scrupulously respects his recipe for the "composition" of a field recording (see this lecture, at 6'34): a sound ambiance laid like a foundation on which rustle sonic traces of often animal habitats, endowed with a greater dynamic, and on top of these two layers, at the pinnacle, a particular object, even more present, which gives the piece its individuality. " A shimmering acoustic, a special timbre, sometimes rhythmic, percussive, fleeting animal sounds. By turns windy, wet, dry, narrow, wide, hot, cold, daytime, nighttime, serene, threatening, inhabited by a thousand animal voices, croaking, singing, squeaking, roaring, that infinite collision of life forms and elements we call "nature", Stepping into the Dark has an elemental power in the magical sense of the word. Our senses, the body's memory of them, are awakened by the sound. Watson finally takes the opposite view of musique concrète and its somewhat demiurgic dream of pure sound creation detached from all causality, suspended in a space that absolutely transcends its genesis (making the "dramatic context" of the fixed sound vanish, according to Schaeffer's method). He replaces it with an Orphic reverie of exploration of the depths, the physical folds as much as the memories of the world. HisSound Map of Sheffield, made in 2013 for the Millennium Gallery, belongs to a similar register.

Watson generally prefers the least post-produced 'naturalistic' pieces possible and the 'long forms' of raw recording where the artwork, in addition to the choice of microphones and their placement, comes down to deciding the beginning and end of the recording. This approach can be found in the strangeclose-ups of animal sounds such as the purring of a monkey (!) or the scraping of a horse's teeth inOutside the Circle of Fire (1998). " Can we listen to a listening ear?" asks Peter Szendy in his book Listen, a History of our Ears. Watson effectively reduces the sonic work as much as possible to the transmission of an acoustic experience of reality. It is a life in itself, listening. A wisdom that is acquired, an apprenticeship in perception, a kind of applied phenomenological reduction. Sometimes you have to know not to record in order to record well: "The older I get, the less I record. I'm very careful when I press 'record'," said Chris Watson in 2015. This philosophy permeates the very simple In St Cuthbert's Time (2013), a record on which he attempts to reproduce the sonic environment of the sacred island of Lindisfrane, circa 700 A.D. This meant that he had to record none of the sound parasites of modern life, a mission that must have required, as the site a closer listen pointed out, "a saint's patience".

The folds of reality
But Watson also uses post-production, collage, mixing and filtering techniques. Capturing the spirit of a place does not have to be "pure", it remains a subjective approach to reality, with framing issues similar to those of a painting, a photograph or even a film shoot, to use a term coined by the musician and theoretician Michel Chion. He therefore also plays with more or less overt constructivist forms such as time-lapse (collages of sounds from a single location taken at different times of the day, or even the year, to "compress" time) or the assembly of various sources. In 2010, at the request of the National Gallery in London, he even constructed the entire sound of a famous landscape painted by Constable in 1826, The Cornfield.

With his years of documentary practice, Chris Watson has acquired an impressive knowledge that allows him great precision in his choice of technical devices. But he also possesses a musical experience of the occupation of time (and one would like to say: of volume) which allows him to excel in his montages, to give them an almost narrative fluidity from beginning to end. On Weather Report (2003), he tries to capture the sound substance, the "mood and character" of very different meteorological regions. In a series of pieces lasting just under twenty minutes each, he lovingly combines the sounds of the same place spread out over periods varying from one day to several months, in Kenya (the muggy Ol-ooolol-O), in Scotland (the very pastoral The Laipach) and in Iceland (the very cold, very windy, very loud Vatnajokull).
Finally, Tren Fantasma (2011), his most constructed work, is a direct offspring of his youthful love, Schaeffer'sÉtude pour chemins de fer. Watson crafted a sound poem(Tone Poem) from a month's worth of sound recordings on a now-abandoned Mexican train line, composing "the music of a past journey through history." One could of course say: the spirit of a train. He recomposes at will the living emanations of the machine, plays with the engine's percussion and ambient harmonies, filters certain periodic repetitions in the manner of electro musicians(El divisadero). He dreams his subject at least as much as he records it. Things are thus almost reversed compared to the Cabaret Voltaire era: on this record, the music has become the stowaway of the field recording work. As if it had emerged of its own accord from the fascinated observation of the secrets of matter, of what Henri Michaux in his time called "life in the folds".

Guillaume Ollendorff