Yearly Archives: 2020

Wildlife recordist Chris Watson and spatial audio sound artist Prof Tony Myatt begin a three-part journey to the Sea of Cortez hunting for the song of the largest, and possibly loudest, animal that has ever lived – the blue whale. It’s also an animal that Chris has never managed to record. Will this trip change that?

www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2020/dec/01/deep-blue-notes-episode-one-podcast

According to Chris Watson, the man behind your favorite wildlife soundtracks, we’re just becoming better listeners

www.outsideonline.com/2417579/has-nature-gotten-louder-during-pandemic#close

Book tickets here

David Lindo is The Urban Birder – broadcaster, writer, speaker, tour leader and educator. His mission is to engage city folk around the world with the environment through the medium of birds.

He is the author of The Urban Birder, Tales From Concrete Jungles, #Urban Birding and How To Be An Urban Birder.

He has regular columns in Nature’s Home (RSPB), Bird Watching Magazine (UK) and recently, Bird Watchers Digest (US). Plus, he has written countless articles on urban birds, urban conservation and wildlife in general for many websites, publications and magazines and plus, the forewards to several books. He is a regular television and radio presenter and has been featured on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 in the UK as well as other TV and radio channels around the world including CBS in the United States.

David was recently named as the 7th most influential person in wildlife by BBC Wildlife Magazine.

“In the golden hour of evening light I fixed my favourite microphone array under a stand of ancient oaks and recorded in a surround format throughout the night and across the dawn. It was warm, dry and flat calm as I gathered a continuous long form piece within the woodland of stillness, drama and song as the night flowed into sunrise.”

A 9-hour dusk-til-dawn field recording from Holystone Oak Woodland in Northumberland as captured in binaural sound by Chris Watson. Experience it in real-time from 21.15 – 06.15 BST this Friday/Saturday June 12/13 exclusively through the Isolation Room YouTube channel (now available)

Put on your headphones…

Celebrated sound recordist Chris Watson has been using lockdown to explore some of the extraordinary wilderness locations a short trip away from his Northumberland home. At the top of his list is Holystone oak woodland in Northumberland National Park. Over one night at the start of this month Chris headed out with his recording equipment and a bivvy bag to capture the songs, sounds, and atmospheres of this ancient sacred forest.

The Sylvan Space is an continuous 8.5+ hour recording from sunset to sunrise, beginning in the magical ambience of the gloaming, through arcane animal activity in the short summer night, into the glorious early light and a tumult of birdsong. .

Roe deer bark, bat wings flutter, woodcock display on their roding flight, and somewhere a distant rifle rings out as warning to would-be poachers. There’s much activity in the ultrasonic range as Pipistrelle bats gorge on insects all around the mic. At 03.34 the first bird, a redstart, breaks the stillness and heralds the long and glorious choir of voices comprising the peak of the year’s dawn chorus.

The Sylvan Space will be played in real-time from 21.30 thru to 06.00 this Friday/Saturday June 12/13 exclusively through the Isolation Room YouTube channel

Chris Watson is one of the world’s foremost sound recordists with a particular and passionate interest in the sounds of animals and habitats from around the world. As a composer and sound recordist Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations, which feature a strong sense and spirit of place.

His television work includes many programmes in the David Attenborough ‘Life’ series including ‘The Life of Birds’ which won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ in 1996, and as the location sound recordist for the BBC series ‘Frozen Planet’ which also won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ (2012).

Isolation Room is a YT channel dedicated providing the very best of binaural (aka ‘headphone surround’) recordings during lockdown. We are extremely happy to be able to add this unique field recording by Chris to our recent catalogue of live musical collaborations with Jónsi & Alex Somers, John Luther Adams as played by Oliver Coates, and Icelandic singer-songwriter JFDR. Further music collaborations with Mount Kimbie, Anna Calvi and Jockstrap are coming soon.

Outside of lockdown, Isolation Room works as Loss/Gain to stage real-life surround sound events, presenting new ways of experiencing work by artists such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Anna Meredith, London Contemporary Orchestra, Rival Consoles, Claire M Singer, Todd Dockstader, Colin Curry Group and others, interpreted for d&b Audio’s multi-channel Soundscape system. Watch this space.

Loss/Gain and Isolation Room are founded by veteran music manager John Best and sound artist David Sheppard.

New York Times, June 3rd 2020

Albums featuring chattering animals and roaring weather systems have blurred the boundaries of music and chance, new age and noise.

by Christopher R. Weingarten

www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/arts/music/field-recordings.html

featuring:

Chris Watson – Outside the Circle of Fire
Jana Winderen – Energy Field
Chris Watson – El Tren Fantasma
Jacob Kirkegaard – Eldfjall

20 new and exclusive tracks recorded by Touch artists. A photographic counterpoint,
the view from Hampstead Heath during the London lockdown. Touch: Isolation is a subscription project that will evolve over the coming weeks. Click here to subscribe.

A time to support independent music while it still exists!

“Please keep your distance, the trail leads from here…”

The cancellation of gigs and festivals has already severely impacted our artists creatively and financially. In addition it has denied you, our audience, the opportunity to see them play and support them. The notion of ‘independent music’ might, in effect, be pushed deeper into the self-isolation mode it is already struggling to break free from. We don’t need studios to the same extent, but we do need a stage, a physical reference and if not, a mental space with which to question the drive to online existence.

We set out to respond to these challenging times in a creative and helpful way. The idea is to present Touch: Isolation whereby a new exclusive track from one of our artists, each with a bespoke photograph/cover image, is presented on a regular basis over the coming weeks. All the income received is collected from your subscriptions and put in a kitty, the proceeds of which are then divided up between the contributing artists.

These new and exclusive interventions will include works by Oren Ambarchi, Richard Chartier, ELEH, farmers manual, Fennesz, Bana Haffar, Howlround, Philip Jeck, Bethan Kellough, Daniel Menche, Anthony Moore, Yann Novak, Zachary Paul, Claire M Singer, Geneva Skeen, UnicaZürn, Mark Van Hoen, CM von Hausswolff, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen and others to be confirmed – all expertly mastered by Denis Blackham.

We invite you to take this unique opportunity to support the artists, without whom there would be no alternative to corporate art… support the industries which realise the artists’ creation – the uncredited producers, designers, software developers, distributors, vinyl cutters, mastering engineers, friends and family etc., who all symbiotically depend on the other to bring their works to fruition…

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The subscription costs £20 for 20 (or more) tracks – please support the artists by investing in the Touch: Isolation project, and expect surprises – good ones for a change.

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Social distancing. Actual space. If you can get out, you have to get out. Escape velocity – from Brexit, then somehow prevent institutional meltdown? The UK shows the way, in a method that beggars belief.

The photographs were taken on Hampstead Heath during the early days of the UK/London lockdown, 25 March 2020, primarily in West Heath and the area around Golders Hill whose open space minimises the problems of social distancing. The weather, being superb after weeks of high winds and heavy rain, seemed a metaphor for regeneration and recovery, with the trees coming into bloom – in defiance of the scene we witnessed 33 years earlier after the Great Storm of October 1987 when, in the days that followed, the Heath looked like an arboreal graveyard.

The objective is to find a sense of quiet celebration, to look at the balance between the detail and the scaling force of open spaces. Let’s hope they can remain open.

To make 20 (or more) record covers in less than a week for sound and music we had yet to hear, and to then match the photography to each artist’s contribution… If this seems somewhat in the style of the children’s game, ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’, then perhaps that’s more apt than pretending we know how everything fits together at this juncture.

This might also be seen an opportunity to give an early documentation to the mental state of 2020, remembering the year 2000 and the threat of the ‘millennium bug’, this may well become known as the year when x melted into y, to avoid z.

Roughly a dozen years ago, life went broadband. Today we see our reliance on digital systems like never before.

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‘As a dwindling member of the generation that lived through and served in the Second World War I think in some ways this is much worse. It was possible to live in a country area and apart from rationing see little of the war. Bombing was spasmodic and haphazard, and our defences were really good. After a year, there was very little chance of an invasion and much of life – sport, theatres and radio, continued as before. Restaurants and hotels remained largely open, rationed according to turnover.’ David John Harding, b. 1925.