Museum Monday: Raymond Watts Event Recap

In 1981, aged nineteen, he spent four or five months in Tokyo with a small pop band called Clones. The band didn’t explode, but he made connections that shaped the next forty-five years.

“Japan represents my formative years,” he has said, “the beginning of my identity as an artist and a network of meaningful human bonds.” Back in London, he entered the Psychic TV universe as an audio engineer, including engineering Themes 2, their soundtrack for films by Derek Jarman. Then met John Gosling and became involved in Zos Kia, composing, performing and producing with him. This was the same swirling orbit that included John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson before Coil became Coil.

Raymond wasn’t “in” Coil, but he was right there in that Psychic TV–Zos Kia–early-Coil universe while its participants were still inventing what these things might become.

In the same way that many of us are multi hyphenated these days, an important piece for Raymond is the audio engineering side. Proper stuff – tape machines and razor blades, analog stuff with time code and work arounds that created the character.

He worked with artists connected to the Some Bizzare label world, before moving the operation to Hamburg and recording bands from the experimental Neue Deutsche Welle underground. He also worked as a live and studio engineer with Einstürzende Neubauten during one of their most influential periods, with credits connected to Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala and Haus der Lüge. He also worked with Mona Mur and Psychic TV — moving through the Berlin and Hamburg underground as both technician and participant.

Raymond described his experimental process beautifully yesterday, it stuck with me:

“I like to run the tap until the dirty water runs clean.”

PIG emerged in the same way as many projects do — tired of working on other people’s shit, he started working on his own.  Then, Marc Chung of Neubauten introduced Raymond to En Esch and Sascha Konietzko. Their writing and experiments developed into the earliest KMFDM recordings. He wrote for What Do You Know, Deutschland?,  (signed and at the museum) later returned for Sin Sex & Salvation and Nihil, supplying writing and voice to the album containing “Juke Joint Jezebel.”

Raymond’s Neubauten work also brought him into contact with JG Thirlwell. Before long he was part of the first Foetus touring band, playing keyboards, guitar and bass alongside musicians associated with Swans, and later contributing to Steroid Maximus.

“If you’re going to be influenced by shit,” Raymond once said, “be influenced by the best shit.”

That’s one of my favourite quotes now, alongside Geordie Walkers’ “Feature it or fuck it!”

By 1986 Raymond had gravitated to West Berlin – surrounded by the Wall. Armed with his first eight-bit sampler, he began PIG recordings in a basement opposite it. In 1988, A Poke in the Eye…with a Sharp Stick emerged and Wax Trax! picked it up.

After the Wall fell, Raymond returned to London and made Praise the Lard, The Swining, Sinsation and Wrecked, with Karl Hyde of Underworld, Steve White, Günter Schulz and JG Thirlwell. One critic said Sinsation “reset the bar…for what industrial music could be”

At his London studio Ranch Apocalypse, Raymond made major PIG recordings and worked on KMFDM’s Symbols, Attak and WWIII.  It was a hub, for sure.

Then there is Anna Wildsmith, whose spoken-word project SOW became one of Raymond’s most intimate collaborations. He produced, recorded and constructed much of the music around her whispered, screamed and multilingual performances on Je M’Aime, Sick and later Dog. Anna also contributed words and ideas to PIG and became, Raymond said, his “sounding board for everything.” They remained close after their romantic relationship ended, until her death in 2016.

This is personal for me: Invisible Records released Sick, reissued Je M’Aime as PIG & SOW, and took SOW on tour with Pigface in 1998.

Japan kept pulling Raymond back. Schaft’s 1994 Switchblade connected him with Hisashi Imai of BUCK-TICK and Maki Fujii of Soft Ballet, alongside contributions or mixes from Coil, Autechre, John Fryer, Keith LeBlanc and Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jonny Stephens. In 2001 Raymond, Sascha, Imai and BUCK-TICK vocalist Atsushi Sakurai formed the genuinely Anglo-German-Japanese Schwein.

PIG also opened for Nine Inch Nails in 1994, helping lead to Sinsation being released in America by Trent’s Nothing Records. Later, Raymond reunited with John Gosling to create music and sound design for Alexander McQueen, most famously transforming the PIG composition “Inside” for Plato’s Atlantis. Their work travelled from the early Psychic TV/Zos Kia underground to McQueen’s runway and finally into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Boom.

I suggested to Raymond yesterday that he should write a book – I’d be fascinated to read some of the details of these encounters and the times spent in these iconic cities. I feel like, this kind of city to city, country to country transplanting was routine and marvelously dangerous in every way for us back then, wondering what the equivalent is now?

Anyway, I don’t want to write that book here! I just wanted to use today to memorialize some of Saturday’s interactions. And basically say – Holy fucking shit – if anyone is entitled to a ‘been there – done that’ shirt, its Raymond.

Make sure to catch PIG on this upcoming tour, make sure to get there early and sign up for a VIP ticket if you can – I bet Raymond will be really nice to you anyway, but it’s important to support anyone who is actually doing it these days.

The tour dates are here.

The spectacular new release on Armalyte recordings is here (and in the Museum’s Airbnb)

The soap is here.

Our Patreon where you can watch the whole event livestream is here.

Saturday’s spectacular poster is here.

Be safe on the road, Raymond!

Martin Atkins

Chicago ILLANNOYS

ICYMI: PPIM Presents: Dave Hill Live! – Second Show

Our first event with Dave Hill sold out, so we’ve added a second!

Less than a week away, but there are still a few slots available.

THIS FRIDAY:

Fresh off opening for Puscifer’s North American tour, Dave heads out again this fall as their opening act across Europe and the UK. In between, he’s making a stop at the Museum for a night that’s part stand-up, part rock show, and entirely unfiltered.

“One of the funniest people alive.” —The Atlantic

“Brilliant.” —New York Magazine

“He is at the vanguard of a new class of entertainers.” —Wall Street Journal

“Hill’s loose jabs and affable, nice-guy demeanor are what make his gently absurdist comedy so enjoyable.” —The Onion

We look forward to welcoming you all and Dave Hill for this exciting evening event!