forthcoming....


forthcoming:

may 18th-19th: field recording workshop, malmo, sweden

june 13th-20th: field recording workshop with Chris Watson & Jez riley French, Iceland

22nd june - 2oth august 2013: audible silence: the tate, sleeping and waking' - headphone piece exploring the hidden sounds of the Tate modern building, Tate modern, London

september 6-8th: field recording workshop with jez riley french & chris watson, norfolk, uk - places available

october 4-13th: installation (room tones / littorals), Spazioersetti galleria, Udine, Italy

october 11th: resonant terrain walk, castletown, portland as part of the b-side symposium

december 6-8th: field recording workshop with jez riley french & chris watson, norfolk, uk - places available

jez riley french - ‘instamatic: snowdonia’
a document of listening, simply
6 tracks focusing on fence wire recordings & listening to the wind
available as a limited edition, full size taiyo yuden cd mounted on an art card + additional postcard
Review by Daniel Crokaert from 'The Field Reporter' website:
In his Instamatic series, Jez riley French invites us to share his moments of fortunate listening like they are, without make-up nor intellectualizations, retouches or alterations of the source, except a careful selection and probably a bit of equalization…
A hike within some magnificent natural region of North Wales, namely Snowdonia, led Jez to look particularly into the wind, that wind which speaks to us, while sweeping at the same timeendlessly across ever changing landscapes…
that air which circulates, lifts, makes particles, objects and surfaces vibrate, suggesting their outlines and concrete features…
But, far more than a report about a physical truth, the work quickly switches over to the extra-ordinary, underlining a very personal way of experiencing, of giving another dimension to things, and our environment…
Vast palette of amplified metallic resonances of fences planted in the isolation of a still preserved nature…agitation, vibrations, ferruginous supplications…a whole universe stands out, and submits to the laws of another one…a unhurried play of echoes and reflections coming out of the insignificant, and which reminds us constantly that our perceptions are fluctuating, eminently subjective, and tributary of their “captation tools”, but that they can also be the starting point of unexpected emotions…
“There’s an aesthete within us all “ seems to be, roughly speaking, what Jez whispers to us.
Through his care, his methodical record, his sense of listening, the creation of his own range of microphones, Jez acts like a revealer, a non-standard intermediary…
“Snowdonia” succeeds in closing our eyes slipping us into a long travelling through shaggy herbs, dishevelled by an insistent breeze – a Malickian scene…
Just next to us, trembling & bending wires, streaking the rust tones of a jaded vegetation…pebbles shrouded in history shape long grey veins studding the country as far as the eye can see…in the faraway, the shadow of hills asleep, peaceful guardians of a permanent sight…
In our ears, clicks, muffled murmurs of cold metal, aeolian moan, all the tense sensoriality of the world…
“Snowdonia” ends up ringing like the name of a mythical place where one has rendezvous with the other-worldliness…that other-worldliness, disguised under common appearances, here finely caught, and alongside which we often pass by in total indifference…

Thursday, 5 January 2012


a couple of links following Chris Watson across antarctica:



BBC radio - 'soundings from antarctica'


What strikes most people when they first arrive in Antarctica is the quiet . "It's so quiet; its the only place in the world that you can actually hear Geology happening; all these processes that you're schooled to think take thousands and thousands of years, the movement of glaciers and the shifting of rocks ... And that's an amazing experience that process of the landscape changing" says Jeff Wilson, a Director on the BBC series Frozen Planet. And the sounds of 'geology happening' are captured in the first of a new series of NATURE by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson. The sounds of the ice are astonishing; from the huge, powerful grinding and creaking sounds as glaciers calve or ice sheets buckle under pressure, to the delicate sounds of water lapping under thin sheets of sea ice or the tinkling sounds produced when fine needle-like ice crystals move in a breeze of volcanic gases inside an ice cave at the base of Erebus, Antarctica's most active volcano.

With contributions from some the team who worked on the BBC series, Frozen Planet, NATURE presents a journey in sound across this frozen landscape. Whilst above the ice, the landscape is quiet, below the ice the underwater world is full of sound; for example, Orcas (killer whales) use pulses of sound to navigate rather like bats and produce and squeaks and whistles to communicate with one another over vast distances, whilst Weddell seals produce the most hauntingly beautiful ascending and descending tones. Antarctica - frozen landscape, and surprising, mesmerizing, powerful and haunting soundscape.

Producer Sarah Blunt.



+

touch radio # 49

Chris Watson journeys to the South Pole for the forthcoming David Attenborough series “The Frozen Planet” (BBC, 2011). Here he reports back with his experiences…

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