contact: davidwatsun@gmail.com
David Watson is an experimental musician. A guitarist, bagpiper and advocate for intelligent listening, his work encompasses improvisation and composition in a wide variety of contexts. Originally from New Zealand, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1987.
In New Zealand, he had co-founded the experimental record label Braille Records and organized national and international music festivals there. He settled in New York and dove into the nascent scene around the Knitting Factory.
He has worked intensively with a wide range of extraordinary artists, including Chris Abrahams, Robert Ashley, Frisner Augustin, Marcia Bassett, Tony Buck, Che Chen, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alastair Galbraith, Frode Gjerstad, Shelley Hirsch, Samara Lubelski, Chris Mann, Christian Marclay, Sean Meehan, Ikue Mori, Bill Nace, Andrea Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Talibam!, Yoshi Wada, Alex Waterman, John Zorn, $75 Bill, amongst many others.
His bagpipe work has created a new vocabulary for the instrument. His double CD for composer Phill Niblock’s label “Fingering an Idea” (XI) was described in The Wire as, “shimmering lines piling-up like an old Terry Riley piece.” While his earlier disc “Throats” on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label was described as “brain rearranging massive walls of constantly shifting drone” (Volcanic Tongue). In 2015 Niblock created a new piece “Bag” recording Watson's sounds as source material. They also produced the piece Exploratory_Watson, released by MM backed by a side of The Arditti String Quartet.
The trio Glacial is a collaboration that has been going for 25 years, with two highly acclaimed partners, Lee Ranaldo and Tony Buck. Watson’s guitar playing was for many years a staple in performances of John Zorn’s seminal piece, Cobra.
He has an ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary work. This includes the collaboration with visual artist Cindy Bernard, adapting the satirical historical drama The Inquisitive Musician, to explore conflicts of class, literacy and control within music-making. He has made many scores for dance, notably for choreographer Moriah Evans and Jamar Roberts. Also music for films, notably for Matthew Barney, Abigail Child, Laura Parnes, Martin Lucas and Fred Barney Taylor.
He has a deep interest in processions and parades and has created new works for this form. As an experimental musician he is drawn to the random combinations of order and disorder. He has created a piece for two marching pipe-bands in Hobart, Australia for Mona Foma ; a musical game piece performed in an empty storage facility in Los Angeles for SASSAS; a sonic progress eploring site specitic works for an ad hoc brass band through the city of Wellington, and acomposition for three pipe and drum bands in Dundein, New Zealand.
He curated two intermational experimental music festivals for Artspace in New Zealand, in 2000 and 2001. He founded and organized the New York City music performance seriesWOrK, which presented over fifty concerts predicated on exploring what teh term experimental means to practitioners today. He created the outdoor series Weather Permitting towards the end of covid isolation, taking place on the Newtown Creek in Brooklyn. He was the Artistic Director of SHift (which became Fouroneone), presenting over one hundred concerts in the Willaimsburg space. Currently he organizes a monthly concert, Striped Light, in Long Island City, NYC with Ian Douglas-Moore.