David Watson interview

Jeff Henderson talks to David Watson, expatriate guitarist and bagpiper, and curator of Alt.music 1 2001

How did this festival come about?

Living in New York and travelling a lot, I'm always seeing great musicians and amazing performances and thinking "I wish this could happen in New Zealand", or "I wish so'n'so back home could be part of this". I guess this is my chance to do something about it. All the people we have coming are brilliant, idiosyncratic specialists. They've followed their muse all the way, rather than getting off at the second or third stop. Exposure to this quality of work is rare for New Zealanders. In fact it's pretty rare outside of New York and the larger European cities unfortunately. It's not just the quality, there's lots of "quality" music around. But, with these people, what stands out is their no-compromise attitude. New Zealand is not as isolated as it was 15 years back, when I left. But being small, it necessarily resists extremism; it fosters the mainstream, the middle-of-the-road. There's talent and brains here, but you still need a certain number of people - a critical mass - to create a scene where extreme practices can emerge, to get that kind of specialisation and discrimination. I've just been doing a show in a little theatre on 42nd Street with Genesis P. Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle if you're old enough to know. Playing with Genesis encourages you to be as extreme as possible. Not that there's any keeping up with him, especially after his plastic surgery, and with his grey pageboy haircut and new gold teeth.

What'll the musicians be doing?

I haven't invited them to do anything specific: it's an open brief. They know they're going to do a solo, and they know they'll also collaborate. That's all they know, and that's all I know. It'll be quite fluid. The way to see their best stuff is to give them a green light and watch it develop over a few nights.

What kind of music is this?

A good and simple question, but difficult to answer. What does a powerbook subversive have in common with an improvisational throat-singer/comedian and a hyperstrung violinist? Good timing, I guess. It's hard to pin down this kind of work, especially as it criss-crosses all these other music genres. But a lot of it is about relationships, it's social. Not simply because you're up there together, but because it's about responding, about forging a relationship with someone else who's playing. It's both about the individuals and the process between them: not just what they doing, but how they're doing it. As a player, you're not there to provide finished music, but material to be used by the others. And for the audience, they hear these relationships emerging between the people and between their musics.

So, they're coming to create something unique out of this particular situation?

Exactly. People will be featured as individuals, and we'll also put them in collaborating combinations. And we'll mix it up with musicians who live in Auckland and Wellington. I think Executer - Neill Duncan, Nigel Gavin and Jason Smith - are starters in Auckland, and Peter Daly and Anthony Donaldson in Wellington.

We've had solo artists like Evan Parker, Keiji Haino and Otomo Yoshihide visit New Zealand, but it's rare to have star players here performing with others who are going to stimulate and challenge them.

Right, and these'll be unique combinations. They'll never happen again like this. And it's good the event has three nights to grow in. It's the difference between having someone just put on a concert - which is like meeting them once - and seeing them work in different combinations over days.

Who are these people? Pan sonic, they're from Finland, right?

Originally. There's a resurgence in electronic music, which is both experimental and nostalgic. The way Pan sonic combine the different things they do is indicative of how open things are right now. They have their own custom-made electronics and processors - old-style analog stuff. What interests me is where electronica and experimental acoustic music meet. I mean in re-examining the nature of sound, drone-based music, suspension of time - all that. Sonic exploration. A few years back electronica seemed like another world, but now the connections seem obvious. The reinvestigation of earlier figures like Charlemagne Palestine - that people find inspiration in his solo piano gigs - is informing the ambient electronica scene. Electronica also exploits the scale factor. Over the past year I've been playing bagpipes with Lee Ranaldo on guitar in our trio Glacial. Lee has such a big, slow sense of scale that initially it felt all wrong to me, like bad music. I didn't realise at first how much he was listening and reacting to what was going on. It made me rethink. It was like driving an 18-wheeler when you're used to a bicycle.

So how did you meet Makigami Koichi?

I was organising a Cobra performance at the old Knitting Factory in New York about 1994. I met Makigami through a friend, and got him involved. Cobra is an improvising game piece where musicians who have little in common can work together. It thrives on clashing, colliding genres. Makigami has a background in theatre, and he has an alternative pop band called Hikasu. When I first met him he was doing this record covering pop songs from different eras in Japan with an all-star cast including Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth on drums, Robert Quine on guitar, and Matthew Sweet on bass, and people like Zorn, Laswell, Mark Ribot and Otomo Yoshihide turning up on a few things. The album is a series of vignettes of Japan, like a schizophrenic relay between the traditional culture and the contemporary international one. It's a method actor's take on performing pop songs. But Makigami's gone from this to doing stuff that's simultaneously more avant-garde and more engaged in East Asian tradition. In Auckland we'll probably see him playing jaw harp, which he studied in Tuva in Mongolia. He's a real performer.

He does overtone singing and all that stuff.

He's coming over primarily as a vocalist. His solos are beautifully concise. About a year ago I saw him do a solo vocal performance, and I was left with a sense of "the larynx as technology" rather than "someone singing". I'm not sure why.

I saw Jon Rose at What is Music last year with Louie Burdett on drums and Greg Kingston on guitar. It was great. I've got a bunch of his albums with Tony Buck, Derek Bailey and stuff.

Jon's a visionary, a great improvisor, a violin-lunatic. He's done consistently amazing work for 30 years. He's obsessed with stringed instruments. Last October we co-organised a two week festival here at Tonic in New York, all string stuff, as part of an ongoing series he's been doing called String 'Em Up. It covered everything from improvising string quartets through to completely electronic set-ups. He's fascinated by the possibility of finding someone doing something with strings that he hasn't seen or heard before. I think the chances are slim. He covers a lot of ground, from extreme noise terror to swinging beautiful acoustic stuff. He's done massive monochord things in the Australian outback. I remember an early recording of him improvising during a speedboat race and another of him playing amongst the high pitch racket of tropical birds. Recently he's been using interactive technology, where bow velocity and pressure triggers sequencers and processors. Jon was working in Australia in the 1980s, which was how I met him. He's been based in Berlin and the Netherlands more recently. He's written a couple of books called Violins in the Age of Shopping which marshal violin facts and fantasies, and he's known for building freak violins. He's made over 300, all one-off things, like an 18-string violin, a violin to swing around your head and a violin based on a bike wheel. It got to be a bit of a burden, lugging them around. Then the New York composer Phill Niblock, who was in New Zealand last year, was driving through Slovakia and found a one-horse, one-dairy town called Violin. He told Jon, and Jon persuaded the mayor to accept his violin collection. They've started a museum in their old football clubrooms.

Tony Buck is in The Necks. They did that great soundtrack to The Boys, one of the best Australian films of the 1990s. So does he come from a jazz background?

Yeah. But around 1990, when I first met him, he had his Japanese group Peril, as in "Yellow Peril". It was the first group Otomo Yoshihide was in that got to leave Japan. There was a lot of digital sampling coming off the drums, Otomo on turntables. I think working in Japan was pretty formative for Tony. He absorbed their technological shock-overload improvising, where they overdo everything to the nth degree. Since living in Europe he's absorbed other influences. I know he does quite a variety of things, but now he seems to be mostly into acoustic improvisation, using more space than he did some years back. He's one of the busiest Berlin players.

He's a real "musician" drummer.

Right. There're a lot of improvising "sound" drummers. What separates him is that he's a great rhythm player too. To get all that in one person is pretty unusual.

He does solo shows as well using things like laser triggers.

Yeah, he has two gloves, which I think measure pressure when he's squeezing the sticks and where his body is, stuff like that, and they translate that information into whatever he's got sampled. At the other extreme, he did a fairly long piece for Australian radio with a chain and a bucket. Tony's also involved in the free music scene, working with Peter Brotzmann and Thomas Borgmann, and occasionally Paul Lovens in Berlin, which I think is a special thrill for him.

And he's got a band with Jon Rose.

Yeah, The Exiles.

Yourself, you're known as a guitarist but you've been doing bagpipes stuff recently?

Actually, it's been about eight years, on various pipe projects. I guess I take for granted now that I can work with bagpipes in experimental settings, which may be taking a lot for granted. I don't feel I have to explain any more: "No, it's not a Celtic rock-fusion thing".

Your bagpipe album Skirl lists John Zorn as executive producer. What does that actually mean?

Not a whole lot, other than he paid for it, and his label distributes it. That record's a couple of years old now. It's gotten a lot of airplay. John Schaeffer really pushed it on his syndicated program New Sounds. But it feels like a long time ago, and I'm more interested in the next one.

Which is?

I'm going into the studio in March. Bagpipes again. This time I'll be going more for the obvious - overtones, drones and sonic overload. Skirl feels like everything but. Actually, doing Glacial has brought me to this point. With my guitar improv stuff, I'm working in the instant, being as spontaneous as possible. But playing pipes with Lee is the opposite, I find myself working more in the minute-or-two. Lee's really good at this. Much slower, but with the same intensity. Changes don't have to be overt or dramatic, in fact, they almost can't be.

So, what's the ideal result for this festival?

Good music gets played. People come out and see it. Locals build on connections.

Jeff Henderson programmes the Wellington Jazz Festival