Film Scores for No One: a Patrick Watson project

For nearly two decades, the celebrated singer and songwriter Patrick Watson has also worked as an accomplished composer for film, scoring multiple international movies during that span. It is a logical progression, after all, for someone whose sweeping tunes have already been used in so many television shows and films. But his new program, Film Scores for No One, represents a wildly different and perhaps unexpected strain of Watson’s artistry. In 2019, just before the pandemic began, he visited the studio of electronics pioneer Amon Tobin—“a bit of a genius, obviously,” Watson has said—and marveled at his early Buchla synthesizer, how natural so many of its tones felt. Over the next few years, Watson rooted down, studying modular synthesizer tutorials online and building a rig of his own.

Film Scores for No One is Watson’s opportunity not only to bring those machines and sounds to an audience but also to showcase his love of sci-fi and horror-adjacent music, the kind he rarely gets to make for actual movies. In this multimedia show, where a mix of portraiture and stark lighting set the mood, Watson crosshatches ambient hums with eerie howls and haunted sequences, letting your mind roam toward its darkest recesses. It is a joy, he has said, to explore these unknown spaces, to step onto the stage not knowing exactly what sort of relationship he and his circuits will have. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, laughing before premiering the show at MUTEK in 2024. “I’m usually semi-lying when I say that, but this time, I really don’t know.”