Chris Watson

Taking advantage of the opportunity presented by his participation in the action "I/E Eleusis", Chris Watson will be hosting a workshop on 13 October 2015 in which he will acquaint participants with aspects of field recording, the equipment required and relevant techniques. More specifically, the participants will get to experiment with hydrophones, underwater microphones and sound recording techniques.

The workshop will end with a listening session on 14 October 2015, in which the participants will learn how to appraise their work and its potential applications. Watson will speak about his work and the way in which he composes using sounds from his environment, as well as presenting extracts from his works.

Born in 1953 in Sheffield in the UK, Watson was a founding member of the Cabaret Voltaire, the experimental group which formed in Sheffield and became very influential on the British music scene in the late Seventies and early Eighties. His career in sound recording begin in 1981, when he started work at Tyne Tees, a regional British television station. Since then, he has become passionate about recording the sounds of wild life--the animals, themselves, their living spaces and atmospheres around the world. As a composer and recordist for the cinema, television and radio, Watson specializes in natural history and sound for documentaries, while he also works on sound design in the post-production stage.

His work for the television includes collaborations on numerous episodes of David Attenborough’s "Life series", including "The Life of Birds", which won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television) award in 1996 for Best Factual Sound. Wilson worked with David Attenborough once again more recently, making field recordings for the BBC series "Frozen Planet', for which he once again received the BAFTA for Best Factual Sound in 2012.

Watson has recorded for and taken part in numerous BBC radio productions. In 2000, he received a Distinction for his CD "Outside the Circle of Fire" in the Digital Music section of the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. In 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from London’s University of the Arts. He has composed the sound for a great many visual installations and arts projects in important museums, galleries and public spaces. He also collaborates regularly with Björk.