Paul Stolper is pleased to welcome Chris Watson as the sixth artist in the ongoing series ‘The Silence Between’. Extending over 2,000Km down the Atlantic coast of West and South Africa the Namib desert is an ancient and unique landscape; a vast and mobile ocean of sand where humans mostly fear to tread.
‘Namib’ is a multi channel composition created from location recordings made over the last eight years from the Skeleton coast to remote interior dunes. The piece reflects a timescale beyond our reckoning as it aims to compress 50 million years of evolution into a 20 minute surround soundscape.
‘Namib’ will trace the sound shift created by a dense Atlantic fog bank as it swirls inland before sunrise and transforms the acoustics around the huge sandstone outcrops along the bone dry banks of the Kuiseb river. This event brings moisture and life to the flora and fauna whilst the reduced visibility allows the listener to tune into one of the few spaces left on our planet not smeared with noise pollution.