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Chris Watson & Marcus Davidson, "Cross-Pollination"
The latest album to feature Chris Watson shows a different side to his art, harking back to his roots in Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio while staying true to his current role as a field recorder. The two pieces (one a collaboration with Marcus Davidson and the other a solo work) are both designed as performance pieces utilising Watson’s recordings of nature as the source. However, trickery and aesthetics play a role here that has been absent from his body of work for a long, long time. It sounds like you are there but "there" is not as it seems.
The two long tracks here follow very different paths. The first, "Midnight at the Oasis," is a classic solo Watson field recording and it is exactly what I would expect from such a title: Watson ventured out into Kalahari at night to record the nocturnal desert soundscape. While I expected plenty of night life in such a place (as the unrelenting heat of the day means that most desert creatures are nocturnal rather than diurnal) but I was completely unprepared for the sheer noise of the scene. The insects put most noise musicians to shame and what sounds like mammalian and avian species add a color to the chirping and droning of the invertebrates. It is only when I investigate the liner notes that I see that this is not a 28 minute excerpt during the night but an audio compression of sunset to sunrise (I suppose something akin to time-lapse photography).
On the subject of droning invertebrates, "The Bee Symphony" makes up the rest of Cross-Pollination. Here, Davidson combines Watson’s recordings of honeybees with similar documentation by Mike Harding before arranging a choral accompaniment to the apoidean sounds. The Bee Choir gives a human countenance to the bees’ buzz, their vocalizations following the swells and undulations of the high-frequency beating of the tiny wings. It is a fascinating experience and although the sounds of animals have always interested me, hearing human voices mimic the bees makes me listen to the bees here and in my garden in a more focused way. This has always seemed to be Watson’s goal on his previous solo recordings and Davidson has hammered this point home with firm precision on "The Bee Symphony."
While I think I prefer Watson’s regular recordings, unadorned moments in time caught on tape, I do feel that Cross-Pollination is a successful experiment. It would be nice to hear the bee recordings on their own but equally it would be interesting to hear more of Watson’s recordings integrated into other works. Davidson has done a wonderful job here; the balance between the choir and original recordings is perfect. Equally, Watson’s way of playing with time on "Midnight at the Oasis" could be employed in a number of different environments with, I imagine, interesting results.
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