Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Chris Watson - Stepping Into The Dark



Label: Touch
Released: 1996
Style: Field Recording, Ambient

"The thing I really love about Chris Watson is that his recordings are not 'merely' field recordings. There is something inherently lazy about so much field recording, where artists tend to look to filling a passage of time rather than really listen to the sounds and the textures they are capturing - not so with Chris Watson. The British sound recording expert who honed his talents working with the Hafler Trio and Cabaret Voltaire (before being snapped up by the BBC as a wildlife recorder) seems to have an inexplicable ability to capture environmental sound as music. These are simple, unprocessed recordings yet are more captivating to listen to than so much straight music out there. Although there are plenty of wildlife recordings on offer here (the most striking being the birds and insects of 'River Mara at Dawn') there is nothing trite or cynical about Watson's work. Watson treats the call of a bird or the fluttering of a dragonfly's wings as a layer or instrument in his piece and you get the feeling that these recordings were selected from hours and hours of work. In my opinion Watson is at the absolute top of his game, and these recordings are simply incomparable to anyone else working within the genre right now. Totally essential listening..." - Boomkat

Tracklisting:

1 Low Pressure (3:46)
2 Embleton Rookery (4:24)
3 The Crossroads (5:02)
4 River Mara At Dawn (6:27)
5 River Mara At Night (4:59)
6 A Passing View (1:51)
7 Bosque Seco (9:03)
8 Sunsets (5:02)
9 The Blue Men Of The Minch (4:51)
10 High Pressure (5:13)
11 Gahlitzerstrom (4:05)
12 The Forest Path (4:52)

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