Hello from Hy-Brasil: the sounds of a mythical Irish island

I will never forget the first time I heard the eider ducks. Listening to In St Cuthbert's Time, Chris Watson's sonic re-creation of what the holy island of Lindisfarne might have sounded like more than 1,000 years ago, the gentle sounds of the waves, the wind in the rushes and the distant ring of a monk's bell make for a serene, calming soundscape. And then these ducks appear, seemingly right by my ear, their two-part whooping call unlike anything I've ever heard before.

This clarity and presence is what has made Chris Watson the most well-known and in- demand wildlife sound recordist in the world. Whether recording the sounds that bring the startling images of David Attenborough's nature programmes to life, making beautiful, inquisitive radio documentaries for RTÉ and the BBC, or crafting his own unclassifiable albums, Watson's ability to capture and re-create the sounds of the natural world is remarkable.

Watson's personal projects are often rooted in a particular piece of work for radio or television but then bloom into something else entirely. Watson has covered everything from the wild collages of Kenyan hunting drama and Icelandic ice-sheets on Weather Report to the journey of a Mexican ghost train on El Tren Fantasma. A more recent composition, Hy-Brasil, concerns the mythical island rumoured to emerge from the mists off the west coast of Ireland. Inspired by Patrick Collins's 1963 painting of the island, which hangs in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, Watson set about constructing a multichannel audio environment that might bring to life this legendary but unknowable place.

Sight and ears

“It’s sort of my impression of the island, of what might be there, what might inhabit that place, the vocalisations of the animals in the ocean around the island that brought everything there,” he says. “The animals that would evolve there and the landscape which has evolved there. And the fact that it is transient; it only appears one day in every seven years, so this represents the one day on which Hy-Brasil appears to human sight and ears.”

The piece offered him an opportunity to bring together sounds from a much wider geographical base than usual, linked more by poetic licence than documentary reality. Sounds from the Galapagos islands mix with recordings from the South China Seas, the Caribbean, and Svalbärd in the Arctic Circle. A few days spent recording on Skellig Michael provided “local” flavour.

“It’s this collage; islands is the theme, and the sounds of all these different places,” he says. “Our seas and oceans are some of the most sound-rich environments we have, even though we rarely get to hear them. It’s a very sound-rich place. And sound can travel for thousands of kilometres, so I had this idea of sounds from islands all around the world coalescing below the surface of Hy-Brasil and then surfacing on the plants and animals that had been washed up there. Everything from penguins to howler monkeys. It’s just a great canvas, this idea of the island, to project all these sounds and imaginings on to, and make it something coherent and tangible.”

The demands of film and TV productions mean Watson usually has a definite end result in mind for his recordings. For his more open-ended, personal compositions, he retains many of the practices of broadcasting, using narrative ideas to structure otherwise abstract pieces.

“It’s easy for me to think cinematically about my sound pieces, even when there’s no picture,” he says. “I quite often create a storyboard, which is like a substitute for a score. Sometimes I have a combination of storyboard and score. So it’s linear, it’s not abstract.

Even with Hy-Brasil, it follows a sort of "day in the life", so there's the idea of 12 hours in 40-odd minutes. It's a story. In its simplest elements, it's storytelling with sound."

Noise pollution

Watson is very attuned to changes in the way the world sounds. As people such as Bernie Krause have made clear, the sounds of animals are disappearing from our landscapes and from the sea, forced back by human activity. Rising into that vacuum is the ever- increasing hum of noise pollution. For Watson, the problem of noise pollution is much more than just a professional bugbear.

“We’re so surrounded by noise pollution, it affects us psychologically,” he says. “It’s not some artistic whim just to try to go out and seek silence, it’s an essential part of our health and wellbeing, I think. But it increases year on year. It’s more difficult for me. There are places now where, 20 years ago, I could go and make great recordings but it’s now impossible because of noise pollution. Whether you’re building yet another runway at Heathrow or somewhere in the southeast of England, or road-building, or architectural design, which is abysmal in terms of its acoustic failings. It’s all around us, it’s insidious and it affects every aspect of our lives, even when we’re asleep. We don’t have ear lids. We hear everything, but we rarely get the opportunity of listening.”

“By that I mean, opening your ears and engaging with a place. When you start to listen, you start to realise what an environment we live in. It’s worth seeking it out. One of the things I enjoy about Kielder Forest [near his home], even if I don’t record: I just go out there and listen for an hour or a couple of hours. I still learn a lot about the place and the movement of sound and the birds and the other animals within it. I find it completely engaging and refreshing to be in those places. It’s like taking a shower.”

• Chris Watson presents Hy-Brasil at the Little Museum in Dublin on February 24th