Invisible Jukebox: Chris Watson

If you haven't encountered Chris Watson through his stunning field recordings or work with Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio, you really ought to...Via The Wire

Chris Watson's fascination with recording sound dates back to his pre-teen days with a portable reel-to-reel recorder, but was first heard publicly in 1978 on Cabaret Voltaire's debut recording Extended Play. A box set, Methodology 1974-78: Attic Tapes, released in 2003 on Mute, shows that the group had been extensively recording in Watson's loft well before that date. In fact, they started in earnest in 1973, although Watson and colleagues Stephen Mallinder and Richard H Kirk had been collaborating since 1972. Cabaret Voltaire's heyday came in the late 70s and early 80s, when their experimental approach crossed over from Industrial music into aggressive post-punk blasts such as the single ÒNag Nag NagÓ. Watson left in late 1981 having worked on the albums Mix-Up, The Voice Of America and Red Mecca. From 1981-87 he worked as a sound recordist for Tyne Tees Television and later for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. During this period he was also constructing tape collages with Andrew Mackenzie in The Hafler Trio. Since then he has worked extensively in film, TV and radio as a freelance recordist, specialising in natural history and documentary. These projects have included David Attenborough's acclaimed BBC TV series The Life Of Mammals and The Life Of Birds, for which he received a BAFTA award for Best Factual Sound. Since 1996 Watson has released three solo albums of wildlife and environmental recordings for Touch: Stepping Into The Dark, Outside The Circle Of Fire and Weather Report. 2002's Star Switch On features recordings based on his work by artists including Biosphere, Philip Jeck, AER and Mika Vainio, and Watson reconfiguring his own raw sonic material. Since 1994 he has been a partner in the group Hoi Polloi Film & Video Recording. Watson also lectures and is involved in performance and installation work, his current project being Sound Oasis at the Palacio de Belles Artes, Mexico City. Based on sounds of Mexican railways, it runs from 29 September (info: www.noiselab.com). Appropriately enough, the Jukebox was itself a field recording. It took place on Dunstanborough Beach, about an hour's drive up the coast from Watson's Newcastle home.

ROXY MUSIC "THE BOB (MEDLEY)" FROM ROXY MUSIC (Island) 1972

(On opening synth pulses) It's a very familiar sound. (Vocals come in) Fantastic! Roxy Music. Is it "2HB"?

Close, it's "The Bob".

Great track, I haven't heard this for 20 years. This stuff was a huge influence. I love it - it has that beautiful, seductive sound quality with Andy Mackay's sax and oboes mixed in with this really fantastic electronic music, synthesiser music from Eno. Seductive is the best way I can describe it both in terms of the sound quality - it was just outstanding to be able to hear stuff like this.

MB: I think what a lot of people liked about the group was Eno's approach - that you could be a bit of a dabbler and that you didn't need to be Keith Emerson to play keyboards in a group.

Yeah, interestingly he didn't really play the keyboards; it was just a device for controlling the instrument, which is something I had a go at. I ended up with a very similar synthesiser, made by the same company as he used, a now deceased English company called EMS. I built a homemade synthesiser when Cabaret Voltaire first kicked off and then I found enough money to buy one of these EMS AKS synthesisers, which had this beautiful two and a half octave keyboard painted onto plastic. It had no moving parts, it was controlled by capacitance in the way that Brian Eno used his VCS3.

It was such a great sound, it was a breath of fresh air to us all at the time, myself and Steve Mallinder and Richard Kirk [later of Cabaret Voltaire] and the wider circle of friends that we had. I always remember reading the reviews of the first album and everybody said it was great but had really bad production. I never could understand that: I thought all the tracks sounded great.

One of the things that drew [Cabaret Voltaire] together was seeing Roxy Music live. I've still got the poster at home, which is why I know the date - it was November 10th 1972 at Sheffield University, one of the Halls of Residence called Ranmoor. So a tiny gig, it would have been round about a hundred people there. It wasn't Cabaret Voltaire then, but a lose association of friends and like minded individuals who used to hang around together, make recordings and play them back. We were all interested in other things than what we were being fed at the City Hall and on the radio, and on record.

MB: This might sound an odd question but were you ever a 'proper' keyboard player?

No. I never was, am, or will be interested in playing a musical instrument in that sense. It was a good way to control some of the sounds were were producing. It never really appealed to me at all. It wasn't a case of wanting a short cut, it was just doing it in a way that was different. I was interested in going against what was still a 70s convention and also couldn't be arsed to practice in order to produce sound that had already been produced, or to rearrange that in another way. Without sounding too grand I think we were all more interested in the greater aspects of the music rather than the minutiae of whether we could play or not (laughs). We knew what we wanted to do at the time.

MB: Has Eno's work continued to interest you?

He always has because I like the way he shaped ideas. I like his production work as well, especially his work with Talking Heads. He brought some very interesting techniques into their music. The other thing I remember is seeing him with Robert Fripp at the London Palladium. That again was incredible. It was the first time I'd ever seen the creative use of electronic imaging on video rather than film. We could never afford to use video and film was far more mechanical and accessible medium which Richard used to work on a lot and produce some outstanding stuff, but seeing simple but powerful video techniques live in association with that music was great.

I've got a lot of respect for him. I don't continually listen to what he does but I like to catch up and to hear stuff. Because with a lot of musicians like that, what I'm interested in is that exchange of ideas and possibilities as much as the end result, which can often be disappointing - in all our cases. But it's those discussions, exchanges of ideas and little snippets of sound that certainly help me with my work.

RICHARD HUELSENBECK "INVENTING DADA" FROM FUTURISM AND DADA REVIEWED (SUB ROSA) 1959

So it's someone talking about Hugo Ball. Tristan Tzara? Can I have another guess if it's not him? Fantastic I've never heard it whatever it is but it sounds interesting. I'm fascinated, but I'd have to guess. I don't know who this is but I'd love to get a copy.

MB: It's Richard Huelsenbeck, the German writer and poet, and one of the original Dadaists.

I used to like the Performance Cancelled, a group from the Cabaret Voltaire. They used to organise concerts, but they used to write Performance Cancelled horizontally across the poster. Then they would turn up and do it.

MB: The music in the background is a composition by Marcel Duchamp.

Really? Music by Marcel Duchamp? Astonishing.

MB: I was wondering whether Dadaism was actually an influence on Cabaret Voltaire or whether it was simply a neat name to use for a group?

No, it was a massive influence, because we were all interested in the history of art and we all seemed to come across it at more or less at the same time. And the more we explored it, we couldn't believe people were getting up to this stuff in the early part of the 20th century, when it would have been genuinely outrageous and clearly unique, and also highly creative as well. I love that association of poets, musicians, artists writers - a free flow of information in somewhere like a cafe. We used to hang out a lot in pubs in Sheffield and just sit and talk - not about higher things like art - but there was an exchange of ideas. The more I looked into the history of it the more I found it compelling and fascinating. I loved the humour and I loved the darkness of it as well. It just seemed perfect and it seemed perfect for us to lift the name, for it spoke for us very well.

Particularly [the influence of ] the poetry in Mal's vocals. We explored the cut-up techniques of later on, Burroughs and Bowie and people like that, but then to go further back and look at some of their work, that again was an inspiration to us: the vocals and some of the writing as well. Cos I'd never heard this CD, I'd heard some crackly recording of the Ur Sonata [by Kurt Schwitters], but I certainly wasn't aware that Duchamp had made music, for example. I just wish I'd been to a performance at the Cabaret Voltaire - a poetry reading, or someone bringing in a new painting, or smashing something against the wall.

MB: Why did you leave the group?

Because I knew there was something else that I wanted to do and it was very, very difficult: I still think about it. But I was getting increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied about what was going to happen. I could see us going more down the road of signing a record deal and we'd never intended to do that, really. It was just that old thing of Revolt Into Style that did concern me genuinely at the time, and there were other things I was quite keen to explore. It was quite a selfish -or solo - thing I was interested in and I introduced some elements of those using tape recordings into our work, which I thought was quite successful. But one of the key things was, I remember we had a connection with Soft Cell and when "Tainted Love" got to number one, we got invited to the Top Of the Pops studios. I spent a day or so in amongst all that nightmare and thought, 'This really is bollocks; I really don't want to be ever part of this'. I felt quite shocked and upset about it. So that really made me start thinking about alternatives and that grew. There weren't really any tensions within the group, we were still more or less headed in the same direction, but it's a difficult thing to decide. I still don't know if I did the right thing or not. You always think, 'What if'?

MB: Into the late 80s, they seemed to get into that awkward area where they were stuck between being experimental and almost, but never quite, breaking through commercially.

I think Richard has done a lot better since producing his own work, which is original and inventive and he's prolific as well. So maybe that's how it had to be.

MB: Is Steve Mallinder still doing music? I've lost track of him completely.

So have I. I think he emigrated to Australia over on the west coast in Perth. I think that he's got a radio show and did a collaboration with someone else out there like a DJ or something but it's all third hand information.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS "THE SAINTS GO MARCHING THROUGH ALL THE POPULAR TUNES" FROM NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS (INDUSTRIAL) (1979/80)

Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, William Burroughs. Fantastic. I was so pleased when Genesis [P-Orridge] got this out and brought this stuff all together. So syrupy and so chilling, the voice. [At words coming out in clumps due to the tape editing] Those words do just come off the page; that's how it is.

MB: What do you think about the recordings that Burroughs did latterly with people like Bill Laswell. Do you think music was a good medium for him to work in?

I don't really, no. You couldn't really improve on what he did in literature. It was an interesting departure. I liked his ideas in Electronic Revolution about his use of sound recording and tape recording techniques, but as for crossing over into music, it was an interesting diversion but had nowhere near the power of his text, or indeed his spoken word, or this [referring to abstract blast of noise between speech fragments]. This is perfect and I guess this is music. I was always interested in his street recordings in Tangier. If you read Electronic Revolution, there's some fascinating stuff in there about it. And recording and playing things back in the streets as well. Which again is something we had done before Cabaret Voltaire. Without anywhere to perform we would make recordings and play them back out of the back of a van when we were driving round Sheffield. And it was great then discovering that someone like Burroughs had also done it.

MB: What about your editing of tapes - was that influenced by Burroughs or did it also just develop independently?

Again, with Mal and his vocals, that was a technique that was definitely applied even though it was down more to free association rather than actual cutting up bits of vocals. We did a couple of experiments where we actually cut up the multitrack tape, which was less successful, but it was something to explore, to investigate, which we did all the time. It was exciting to try and see what these things would reveal. I still like that, the subliminal aspects of sound: I don't think that's been fully explored at all. There's such a wide range of material to work on.

MB: What exactly do you mean by subliminal aspects of sound?

Hearing things in recordings that listening to them in other ways can reveal. Even simple things like putting a microphone down here among this marram grass and hearing the wind blowing through the grass, but also listening on another level so you can hear the insects in the bottom end of the grass. And then by manipulating those recordings you hear other things. It reveals things other than what is just on the surface. It's a powerful technique.

ANNEA LOCKWOOD "LAKE TEAR OF THE CLOUDS, MT. MARCY - THE SOURCE, ELEVATION 4,322 FEET. JUNE 19, 1982 AT 2PM" FROM A SOUND MAP OF THE HUDSON RIVER (LOVELY MUSIC LTD) (1982)

I don't immediately recognise it but I like the sound. I'd say it was recorded in the New World, North America.

MB: It was indeed.

I'm just trying to narrow it down. It sounds relatively unprocessed so I would say someone like Gordon Hempton, Doug Quinn or Bernie Krause, perhaps Hildegard Westerkamp, I don't know, I've not heard it [before]. It's very well recorded whoever did it, a beautiful section of sound.

MB: It's Annea Lockwood's A Sound Map Of The Hudson River. She is principally a musician, composer and sound artist.

I know her name, I don't know the piece.

MB: When you are making your own recordings like Weather Report, how much do you try and get a flavour of the overall environment and ambience of the area and how much is it a recording of discrete phenomena that took place at a specific location and time?

I like to hang out in place if I can. I like to spend time there, I like to explore it, and I like to go round and listen. The easy analogy is it's rather like landscape photography. I first of all wander around without any gear because its quite heavy and then I go back, usually out of hours, like very early morning or through the night. So then I spend time there recording and listening, moving the microphones around. It's quite time consuming if I have the luxury of time, but that's by far the best way to do it. It sounds a bit odd, but I sometimes do some research beforehand on the social history and geography of the place cos that can effect how a place sounds as well. A lot of what I do is revealing sounds, but also revealing something of the place, because it's tied up with the history and the geography and that's reflected in the animals as well.

MB: What was the project where you were testing the acoustics of ancient burial chambers?

I worked on a programme for Radio 4 called Stone Age Sound, but it wasn't my project. It is believed that a lot of megalithic tombs like Maes Howe in Orkney and New Grange in Ireland have special acoustics and they didn't just happen - they were designed, so that people making music or vocalising in there could set up standing waves, which can then have significant psychological effects. It appears to amplify itself and it also had a ventriloquial quality so that sound can appear to emanate from places where there are no people. So, interesting idea, although not my project. [Referring to track] It's nice the way it builds up. It's a beautiful rich, textural sound..

MB: What I personally find fascinating is that field recordings always capture unique unrepeatable events within continuous processes.

Yes, like the sound of the sea. What I'm also interested in is when things have been recorded and presented on CD, you then have a chance to listen to it properly rather than walking past and sort of hearing it, or ignoring it. It can have tremendous depth and content or it can be just nice to put on when you are making the tea.

What about the question that's always asked about environmental recordings: are they more or less than the thing itself? In a way they can't be more because a recording is by definition a facsimile, but it does focus you on something you might not otherwise notice.

It's something I've thought about a lot. The first thing I did on Touch, Stepping Into The Dark was quite simple in that it was recordings of particular places that I thought had particular significance as well as having a remarkable sound. And by playing them back, it was very much an experiment to see if any of the effects, the consequences of being there and listening, could be reproduced. I think some of them can - a lot of us have feelings of a room or a house that has an atmosphere, the sound of that place contributes a lot to how we feel about it.

MB: Like the acoustics of a train station?

Yeah, the thing I'm doing at the moment in Mexico [ Sound Oasis, a sound installation in Mexico City] I'm basing it on sounds of the Mexican railway system, rather than any natural environment, it's complete urban industrial environment along the rail system. Although there are periods of quietness and stillness in it in the desert, they are always broken by the thunderous animals roars of massive diesel engine bearing down upon you. But some recxordings I made there in very reverberant acoustics, in railway stations, one in Vera Cruz. You only need to hear two or three seconds an all of us would be able to know what place it was, we immediately have a mental image.

VARIOUS (RECORDED BY MARK GERGIS) "VIP DINNER KNIVES AND THE SONGBIRDS OF AL HARAMAIN"/"WINGED AND WINDED RECEPTIONS" from I REMEMBER SYRIA (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES) (2005)

Is this commercially available? I wish I'd got it. I love hearing Arabic. There's so many people who have done stuff like this, even going back to Holger Czukay and his radio sounds.

MB: It's a kind of travelogue of street sounds, radio, TV and interviews from Syria - Damscus on this disc - by Mark Gergis. It's on the Sun City Girls' Sublime Frequencies label.

I don't know him but it's fantastic. I'll get a catalogue number of that as well.

MB: When you used Middle Eastern sounds on Cabaret Voltaire's Three Mantras, I assume that was from a commercially available recording rather than one you did yourself?

It was a friend of ours, who had gone to Israel and some other parts of the Middle East and brought me back an audio cassette. I thought it was great. This is too.

MB: I like this as a sort of sonic patchwork of parts of the country.

I love that sort of thing, it's so effective. I was working with Justin Bennett the other week and he gave me a couple of his CDs, including a little CD single, The Mosques Of Tangier which is incredibly atmospheric. Beautiful record, the.artwork's lovely and a great sound. Also he did something in an apartment in Beirut, which is another place I've recorded and it was magical, like this. This is turning into a real education, I must get that CD. I miss out on so much and a lot of the time it's because I'm often away.

MB: Do you listen to this kind of recording for pleasure as well?

Very much. I love compilations like this. I think they've got fantastic quality. I like listening to music like this but also, recordings of music made in streets. I find them really deeply involving and interesting and like listening to them like pieces of music. I find it richly rewarding.

STEVEN FELD "GALO, AFTERNOON" FROM RAINFOREST SOUNDWALKS: AMBIENCES OF BOSAVI, PAPUA NEW GUINEA (EARTH EAR) 2001

MB: It's quite a strange experience listening to this in some sand dunes in Northumbria.

I like displaced sounds, yeah. Well, it's a recording from the Tropics. That's a sort of gaseous hiss of cicadas, the deep beat of pigeons or doves and that beautiful whooping. It could be Madagascar; they could be Gibbons. It's not easy to tell if it's Africa, Asia or South America. Let me have a think for a bit. It sounds like an unprocessed recording. It sounds to me like it's Madagascar or South East Asia, so it could be one of the [John C.]Roche series of CDs. Just give me another minute. It's a good track, a good recording; it's got a really nice richness to it. It could be one of Hildegard Westerkamp's pieces but I don't think she's ever been to South East Asia. [Looks at CD sleeve]. So I was right about the area. It's not one of Earth Ear's that I've seen. I like those large scale macro environments, especially played on those wider angle, larger stereo systems because they become very otherworldly. It also amplifies elements like the rhythm and the dynamics, they become very powerful and so bizarre - you couldn't make music like that. I really like that Cage-ian attitude, that there's enough sound out there without the need to make any more music - its just a case of capturing some of it.

MB: I'm interested in the techniques you use to record wildlife close up rather than in a soundscape like this.

It's time consuming but I enjoy being absorbed in that sense of place. It's a bit like stalking something or hunting, you really need to get to know the subject. It's so rewarding when you get that close-up detail of sound because so much is revealed, things you wouldn't normally have the opportunity of hearing. And I like the combination of the two: the wide-angle perspectives of places, and that really intimate detail, where all the rhythms and textures are revealed.

MB: How did you place the microphones in your famous recording of the Zebra carcass being ripped apart by vultures, for instance?

That recording I'd been after getting for two or three years. I'd seen it happening at a distance and often wondered, as with a lot of those close up sounds on Circle Of Fire, what it sounded like being in amongst it and what it would be like being in there - that's the most extreme example.

We were out one morning in Kenya's Masai Mara doing general recording, and we came across this zebra carcass, which must have been killed by lions in the night. It was quite early on so it wasn't that hot. Way above, 10,000 feet above us ,were a group of vultures circling . They had obviously seen it, but they are very wary and it takes some time for them to come down. So I quickly took the opportunity and used some little nylon cable ties and tied some tiny cable microphones to the ribs. I buried the body of the microphone and buried the cable and then ran 60-odd metres of cable and sat and waited. So once you've done that, put the work in, you really just have to wait and wait and wait for four or five hours. By then it was really hot so the whole thing was full of flies, which added to it.

I like the proximity of things like that. I'm not usually anthropomorphic about animals but vultures sound exactly as we image them to - the calls they make sound like bursts of guitar feedback and then this sort of threatening hissing and breathing, and powerful wing flaps, so it's a very oppressive, sinister and horrifying environment.

I sometimes do talks at schools: I did a talk at my kids' secondary school and the middle school when they were about eight or nine. I played that track and said, 'If you are ever going to be eaten alive by vultures, these are the last sounds that you will ever hear,' (laughs) and then played the track. And about three of them burst into tears.

After I flew back from Kenya, I was going to work on a film project and my cameraman colleague picked me up at Heathrow. We had a couple of political interviews for a very regular, straight TV documentary. We had to interview some Whitehall mandarin, and because it was a press conference we didn't have much time to record it properly. I just got my personal mikes out and I remember clipping one to the lapel of his pin stripe suit and I could see bits of dried blood and hair, and zebra viscera stuck to this microphone. He was sat there throughout the interview and I thought 'If you knew the last place that microphone had been we would all be chucked out' (laughs).

BASIL KIRCHIN SKETCH TWO FROM CHARCOAL SKETCHES TRUNK (1970)

[After a few notes of the exotic bird, guitar and flute duet] I really, really hate this, whatever it is. No, stop it, it's dreadful.

MB: This is Basil Kirchin. Do you know his music?

I've heard the name and I may even have got an LP of his. That is just so bad.

MB: Is the music or the fact that it's a dialogue with some sort of bird?

It's everything I don't like. Honestly. It's a strange mix of what to me sounds like slowed-down bird song and some ghastly quartet of meaningless nonsense. The music sounds like a prelude to some 1970s porn film - an accidental meeting in a country lane between a window cleaner and some poor woman who's broken down. I can't be unkind enough about things like this. They are so wide of the mark to me. After my initial horror, it's quite funny.

Kirchin was keen that his solo music was, in a sense, against musique concrete; he wanted it to sound more organic.

I've got a vinyl record of his somewhere in my collection, Worlds Within Worlds, is that it? I've not played it for twenty years but something In the back of my mind tells me I thought it was OK. It's certainly better than this.

I wondered if your work in the Hafler Trio shared a similar view towards the organic quality of tape music.

There were a lot of tape collages which is what we were interested in at the time, when I first got together with Andrew Mackenzie. It was a great time to be doing it and we felt we were getting somewhere. It was a short time but it was exciting. There were a lot of recordings that we made and a lot material we manipulated and I suppose that's the best word for it because it was nearly all analogue then. It was all based around ideas that we were currently interested in as well, maybe current things but using old techniques. It was certainly pre-digital, which sounds astonishing to be able to say that, that you've lived through that era. But I sued to love that process. To go back to basil Kirchin's desire, it was an organic process that, manipulating tape rather than pushing a mouse around a screen, it was satisfying in that sense and I particularly enjoyed it.

I still record on quarter inch some things that are on the extreme ends and I found it much more successful than digital recording.

But hasn't digital got a wider frequency range?

It does, it's just the way it treats the sound. With some things, when analogue gets to the saturation point, the very loud sounds it maybe starts to distort a little bit. With analogue recordings when it becomes saturated the distortion is harmonically related to the fundamental frequency. But with digital technology, when you get near to those extreme ends, the sounds hits a brick wall and squares up, you just run out of numbers. I recorded some elephants this way and I'm sure in bioacoustic terms it's not as accurate but it's got a greater richness to it. I'm talking about decent analogue machines; I use Nagra tape recorders. Also if it's got great dynamic range - I've recorded a grass fire in Africa and Coptic monks in Ethiopia with this huge drum, it's better to use analogue sound on that.

How did you actually become a sound recordist then ? I wondered if it was a seamless progression from working with Cabaret Voltaire and then the Hafler Trio?

I always was. My parents bought me my first reel-to reel tape recorder when I was 11, a small Japanese portable player. They set me off. And When I'd gone around the house recording every thing from my mum in the kitchen to our budgie singing, to squeaking doors, the toilet flushing, things like that, I realised it was a portable recorder so I could take it outside. We had a little bird table in the back garden at home on Sheffield and I remember always looking out through the window and seeing what was happening with the birds feeding but just dying to know what it sounded like. Of course, you could never be there because you would frighten everything away. So this was a fantastic opportunity. I remember putting some bird seed down then fixing this little microphone to the bird table, turning it on, running inside and pressing my face up against the window ands seeing all this activity next to the microphone then running out frightening everything off and coming back and putting the tape on and I was just taken into this other world and it was just a beautiful; experience. And when I started working with sound recording and thought of the musical possibilities, the worked with Cabaret Voltaire and just carried on and the just gradually got more drawn towards recording sounds.

And with my pocket money I bought this book in a little shop in Sheffield and it was called Composing with tape Recorders by Terence Dryer or Terence Dwyer, a little paperback. As a 12 - 13 year old I had no experience of musique concrete or experimental music and when I saw these pictures of tape loops round jam jars and stuff like that, it was just great: grown-ups are doing this so I can have a go.

As I've said it was a much more interesting music than could be contrived in a studio, really. It might look a strange kind of path, but to me it seems seamless.

MIRA CALIX Excerpt from Nunu (Warp) 2003

Lots of interesting insects. [At appearance of loop] Oh dear what's this? I know it's not, but this sounds like it should be called Another Green World. It's not as offensive as Basil Kirchin to my ears, but it's a collection of mixed cicacda and cricket recordings, with some ambient music, but I don't know who it is.

It's Mira Calix. This is part of a 30 minute piece commissioned by the Natural History Museum, Geneva.

I don't know why people feel it necessary to put music...those insect sounds to me are far more interesting. Like the stuff that Francisco Lopez does, I love those dense layers of sound. The music on its own I can take it or leave it but it's not bad, it's the mix of the two that I find odd. I've heard of Mira Calix.

I know that some of your own recordings have been processed and remixed and that you've done some yourself. What sort of contrast would you draw between that approach and the one used here?

The stuff that I do, I like to think, stands on its own. But that compilation piece I did with Touch, Stars Switch On, the reason why I was very happy to do it and liked the results was that people I liked and had respect for treated it stylistically very differently. There was a reason for them doing it. I get lots of requests from people wanting my material just to have a go with it, you know? To mess about with it. I really don't like that and don't do it basically. People like Philip Jeck and Christian Fennesz, I'm very happy to collaborate with them. Some of those tracks were very different and I got a different experience listening to some of those. But it's still few and far between: I don't seek to collaborate in that sense.

Do you think it has a certain novelty element to some people?

I'm sure, yeah. But it's been around a long time I've just been doing this soundscape recording course with CMMFA [Contemporary Music Making For Amateurs] and doing a bit of research. Some of the people were amazing, they were just very keen to learn to record, go out and investigate places, make their own collages of material and present it or make what they thought were particularly interesting recordings. There was another guy on the course who was professional musician. He was a cellist who specialises in Baroque music, but he was wanting to get some recordings he could use with his cello playing so he could explore that. I took with me a 78 rpm disc from 1936, which was the first recorded example of a soundscape that I could find. It was a cellist called Miss Beatrice Harrison accompanying a nightingale in her back garden in Oxted Surrey. I think it was one of the first outside broadcasts the BBC made.

How did that work compared with Basil Kirchin and Mira Calix?

Well, for 1936 I thought it was pretty cool. The other one that I really like is a recording made of nightingales on the south coast nearly a decade later, there's a whole fleet of German bombers crossing the channel to bomb London as a nightingale sings in this orchard - a nightingale accompanied by the Luftwaffe. It's a stunning recording that mix of an incredible birdsong and this hell that's about to fall out of the skies.

THOMAS LEER & ROBERT RENTAL "DAY BREAKS, NIGHT HEALS" from The Bridge Industrial Records 1979

Sounds like something Daniel Miller did under a pseudonym. Robert Rental and Thomas Leer?

You're right.

I don't know the track it's just a really characteristic sound. What year is it?

1979.

That was a great time down at Rough Trade in those days. We used to go down there and hang out with Geoff Travis and Pete Walmsley. In many ways it was a similar time to the way I feel it is at Touch now. There's always a great atmosphere about it.

Do you think that rather primitive electronic pop stands up now?

I don't think it does, no. But I still enjoy it: I'd play it. I'd like to think we've moved on a bit as well. The areas of experimentation have moved on considerably. That's just been absorbed. But at the time it was really cutting edge stuff. It's certainly a long time ago... A quarter of a century.

This was on Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records and I believe Cabaret Voltaire released a cassette on that label. How did that come about?

That was the great thing at that time because we did one or two things for Rough Trade then we did the Factory Sample [compilation album]. We used to go over and play at the Factory Club in Hulme in Royce Road (check) - Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus were kicking off with that.

We could swap about, mix and match, so that was a good time. I think Industrial also did some Boyd Rice and possibly even z'ev. We knew them, in the olden days we used to write each other letters and meet up. Whenever they played north of Watford, sometimes in London. We would go down and see them and to a degree, hang out a bit, share and talk about ideas. I think it just came out of that, over a period of seeing them a few times. We'd done a few very, very limited edition audio cassettes ourselves, so the idea of doing something with Industrial, which had a decent track record and had better distribution than we had was a good way of...we were never going to collaborate musically, so if we could do it in that sense it was a very satisfying thing to do.

I would guess that's the way things came about although I'm very cautious now talking about things like that. Someone contacted me from some e-mail group about something that Cabaret did when we played in Europe with Joy Division at a festival on the outskirts of Brussels called the Plan K, where in fact I actually met William Burroughs. It was a big festival on about three floors and was like this 60s happening - it was great. It was an old sugar beet plant: there was a stage on one floor, they were showing some Brion Gysin films, all sorts of things, performers, dance, readings - Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were on one floor just reading. Cabaret and Voltaire were playing downstairs so we went over in a big furniture van. And somebody asked me something about it for some e-mail group and so I e-mailed them what I thought had happened, in my dim and distant memory and I saw it published and then five people who obviously weren't there and possibly weren't even born, emailed in, corrected my correspondence and said 'No THIS is what happened' [laughs]. They set the record straight. It was quite a shock...