Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll

There's something about the beginning of spring that always makes me think of an orchestra tuning up. Walking through London Fields at the weekend, I was listening to the birdsong gathering pace, to the woodpigeons and the blackbirds, the song and the mistle thrushes, and the greenfinches, the robins, the wrens and the starlings. I stood underneath the plane trees and thought how I must be listening, too, to all of the barely perceptible sounds that somehow contribute to the music of spring: the speckles of rain, the unknotting of leaves, the brushing of wings, of hairs and legs that make up that insect thrum. Last summer, I had the pleasure of working with the sound recordist Chris Watson; I was giving a reading at the Purcell Room on London's Southbank, excerpts from a piece I had contributed to Caught By the River magazine, the pastoral side-project of Heavenly Recordings, and Watson was providing a companion piece, a soundtrack of sorts. While I read, he played a succession of field recordings that involved skylarks and railways and running water, and best of all, the sound of water boatmen, swimming small and brown and oar-legged, through the water. Watson had succeeded in capturing a sound that, though it seemed strangely familiar, was really a minute detail to the ear: this was the water boatman's courtship song, where the male woos the female by rubbing his front legs against a ridge on his head to make a squeaking, chirping, rasping sound. Standing there at the podium and listening to the legs of the water boatmen carrying over the loudspeakers, it awed me a little to think of all these sounds going on around us, barely noticed, yet still an essential part of the orchestra. Watson's work is probably known to many of you in one form or another; a founder member of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio, in the early 90s he became a sound recordist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and then, continuing his particular interest in natural history recording, worked on numerous television and radio programmes – Springwatch, Radio 4's The Reed Bed and A Guide to Garden Birds. He has also released his own records, Stepping into the Dark, Outside the Circle of Fire, and Cima Verde, which was a study of the Italian alpine region Trentino, documenting the sounds produced by changing seasons and altitudes, by the shift from day to night. These records gave us insects and frogs and bats, vultures feeding on a zebra carcass, the sounds of airflow at 3,000 metres above sea level, melting snowfields, and the piercing sound of black grouse on high pasture. In 2003 he released Weather Report. Perhaps his richest work to date, it involved not just sounds that might be descriptive of a particular place, but this time he also ventured into composition, weaving songs from the sound of the Kenyan savannah, or an Icelandic glacier in the Norwegian sea. It was the track Lapaich I loved most: the sounds of a Scottish highland glen, recorded through September to December, the months boiled down to a near-abstract 18 minutes of rain and cows and sharp winds; it was like seeing a familiar landscape painted from a different angle. Last year, I bought an album of birdsong, From the Northern Cardinal to the Red-Bellied Woodpecker. They are beautiful recordings, at times peaceful, at others frantic, but they give nothing of the depth and detail of Watson's recordings. There is something both vibrant and fine-stitched about the way he works; in his hands, birds are not just singers of pleasant, pleasing songs, but creatures that can at times be magnificent and terrifying and exquisite. Recently, Watson made a new contribution to Caught By the River, a remix of the Doves song Birds Flew Backwards, from the band's last album, Kingdom of Rust. It's a song that hinges on the line: "Winter seemed to linger/ But now the swallows have arrived/ Won't be long until summertime." Around this line, Watson has built a great hive of sound, a gathering of seabirds and hedgerow chatter, a petrifying flapping of wings; their voices come sharp and sweet and insistent, swollen by wind and rain, tuned by warm air, into a great orchestra of spring.