David Watson is an experimental musician, his work encompassing improvisation, composition and scoring for film and dance. He plays guitar and bagpipes, and is known for creating a vocabulary for bagpipes as a new-music instrument.

Originally from New Zealand he has been in New York for many years and has worked with extraordinary artists like Robert Ashley, Tony Buck, Moriah Evans, Chris Mann, Christian Marclay, Sean Meehan, Ikue Mori, Bill Nace, Andrea Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Marc Ribot, Yoshi Wada, Matthew Welch, John Zorn, $75 Bill, amongst others.

His double CD for the XI label Fingering an Idea was praised by The Wire as “shimmering lines, piling-up like an old Terry Riley piece.” Twenty years later Foxy Digitalis wrote about the CD Woven (made with Matthew Welch) that it “...is almost unfathomable. Except that this kind of ground-shattering, forward-thinking music is just what Watson and Welch do”.

He worked with Phill Niblock for 30 years, more recently making four pieces together, including Bag (2015), and Exploratory.Watson (2021).

Since 2016 he has organized and presented hundreds of new music concerts in New York under the auspices of WOrK, Shift, FourOneOne and now Striped Light.

In 2025 the Foundation of Contemporary Arts awarded him the Alvin Lucier award for experimental music.

No Idea 2025 Performances
* Solo performance, bagpipes (Saturday night, October 25)
* David Watson (Texas Ensemble), outside performance (Sunday, October 26)