Chris Watson
Weather Report

Chris Watson from 1972 to 1981 was part of Cabaret Voltaire, which, like the famous Dadaist group founded in 1916 by Hugo Ball in Zurich, created a sort of rupture in music. Today, Watson is still a sound researcher, and he turns to nature, creating a work of art in three acts through intricate and fine editing.

In the first act, "OI - OLOOL - O," we are in the Kenyan savannah, and as in every society, there are prey and predators. Just as there is night and day, calm and storm, so too are there life and death, tragedy and comedy. Naturally, all of this isn't surprising at all since our existence is steeped in dualisms, and indeed, what really unsettles is everything that is odd (the trinity, the symbol of the five-pointed star). Therefore, Watson doesn't want to prove anything but simply wants to show (citing Fellini). He shows us something that, with the advent of technology, we have forgotten, namely Nature through perception.

In the second act, "The Lapaich," we are in a Scottish village. The seasons have changed, it is late autumn, the winds create their own music with stones, the birds make their songs heard, there is the obsessive impending arrival of an even colder season.

It indeed arrives in the third act, "Vatnajokull," where winter has come, and suddenly, our room, our environment, turns into a glacier. Watson, who settled in a village with his spouse during the recording of this third "act," stated: "I felt the sounds of the glaciers passing through my flesh... and only after listening to this recording did I understand what I had really seen".

In this "Weather Report" ("Bollettino metereologico"), Chris Watson brings us back a melody that is the child of nature's scream, a nature that is in a state of decay, screaming and pleading with humans for salvation. But, unfortunately, today this scream, this cry, is heard by few like Watson who try to recover what is still harmonious today. According to some, Watson’s work is "a rewriting of nature in a technological key through aesthetic experimentation", for others, it is simply new age. For me, Watson's work (like that of our Domenico Vicinanza) is a "desire to use technology to his advantage to describe the beauty of nature". Watson is aware that the world is adrift since technology has overwhelmed science (an example is, in "Weather Report," the sound of a cellphone disturbing the natural calm) and seeks to show us, in his work, that there are not only humans with their technique on the world but also many other forms of life. So let's close our eyes, put on the headphones, and live in a world different from ours.