hris Watson is a former member of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio and a current field recorder for nature programs (including David Attenborough's "Life of..." BBC series). Oh, and he also releases electronic music. Weather Report is his third full-length work. It consists of three eighteen-minute tracks recorded on location in Kenya, Scotland, and Iceland. The tracks consist entirely field recordings of natural sounds—animals, wind, grass, rain, ice, and water. Importantly, each track was pared down from however many hours of recordings, and the various natural sounds were selected, organized, and compiled to tell a particular story about the places Chris Watson visited.


I would be lying if I didn't give away one key point here: the first two tracks, while interesting in their own right, did not hold my attention. The Kenya track had—what else?—animal noises. The Scottish track? Perhaps rain, storms, wind? You got it. Ah, but the Iceland track—that's the one. It was recorded in and around the massive glacier Vatnajökull, which covers 8% of the surface of Iceland. To me, this track is mesmerizing. Then again, I'm a little biased. You see, I've been there. In the summer of 1984, I spent two months living with a family in Akureyri, Iceland. Akureyri is located in the north of the island, at the mouth of a massive fjord. During the summer, however, I went with my "family" to the south of the island, to stay with another family at their farm near Vatnajökull. This area is on the south edge of the island. There's a huge inlet pool that is made up in part of the Atlantic Ocean and in part from the runoff from the glacier itself. This runoff, in fact, has created the signature image of the glacier—towering cliffs of ice all clumped together as if it were created to be an ideal photo-op. If you've ever seen the beginning of the James Bond film, A View to a Kill, you'll recognize these ice formations as the one Bond skis over while being pursued by Russians (or whoever the villains are in that damn film). It's an amazing place in a country full of amazing places.


So I had this image of Vatnajökull in my mind as I started listening to this album. I was expecting to hear waves, wind, drops of water, a few puffins chirping away, perhaps even some crashing sounds as ice falls into the sea. However, that wasn't anywhere close to what I actually heard. More than anything else, Watson's "Vatnajökull" is dominated by a deep, low, muffled roar—like the sound of an underground river that is close enough to the surface that it is audible but not visible. Amidst this roar are a variety of sounds whose origins can only be imagined: creaking, whooshing, dripping, roaring, gurgling, huffing, and crashing noises that seem to gurgle into life and sputter away, retaining an ever-present mystery. There were even some whistling sounds that seemed to be straight out of one of the worlds in Myst. And, while, there do appear a swarm of bird chirps towards the end of the track, along with a smattering of wind noises and even what I think were seal wails, I have to admit that my first impression was of wonder. It's truly an eerie track, if only because the sounds—all natural, unedited sounds—seem so, well, so unnatural.


And so the track fascinates me, if only because Watson managed to turn one of the more memorable experiences in my life into something that I not only struggle to recognize but something that is so fundamentally alien sounding that it seems to emerge from some alternate universe, a universe of enclosed spaces and impending doom. I know my impression of this album is shaped by my own personal experience, experiences no one else can possibly understand. Hence, my attempts to be objective about this album are destined to fail. But what I can take away from this work—and what I hope you, too, can appreciate—is simply the realization that the world sounds a hell of a lot different than it looks, and when an artist takes away all visual signals and forces audiences to listen and only to listen to a particular place, then we can hear things we'd never see in a thousand visits to the same location. I've been to Vatnajökull, but I never really heard it until I heard this album.