Field Works & Eluvium – “Dusk Tempi”
Stuart Hyatt has built a fascinating career for himself. As a National Geographic Explorer, Hyatt travels around, making field recordings different locations, getting sonic records both natural phenomena and the ambient sounds human life. But Hyatt also releases music under the name Field Work, working together with musicians like Pantha Du Prince and Dan Deacon to turn those sounds that he captures into music. A couple years ago, Hyatt released a seven-disco Field Work box set called Metaphonics: The Complete Field Work Recordings. Later this year, he’ll also release a new double LP with a very particular subject.
On the forthcoming Ultrasonic, Hyatt and his collaborators build music out Hyatt’s field recordings the Indiana bat. It’s part a broader Hyatt project about the endangered bat species, and it uses the echolocation sounds the animals as sonic source material. Hyatt’s collaborators on the album include producers like Mary Lattimore, Noveller, and Kelly Moran. On lead single “Dusk Tempi,” Hyatt works with Eluvium, Portland composer Matthew Cooper’s long-running acoustic-ambient project.
On the six-minute “Dusk Tempi,” Cooper — who released the Eluvium album Pianoworks last year — builds a humming, slow-building crescendo around the whirr-bleep noises those bats looking for food at night. Since Cooper’s work already seems in tune with nature, it’s an inspired team-up, and those bat sounds add something uncanny to the music. In director Anna Powell Teeter’s video, we see Hyatt out in the world, capturing those sounds. Check it out below, along with the tracklist for Ultrasonic.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Dusk Temp” (Eluvium)
02 “Silver Secrets” (Mary Lattimore)
03 “Night Swimming” (Jefre Cantu-Ledesma)
04 “Kelelawar” (Machinefabriek)
05 “Sodalis” (Kelly Moran)
06 “Echo Affinity” (Taylor Deupree)
07 “A Place Both Wonderful And Strange” (Noveller)
08 “Music for a room with vaulted ceiling” (Christina Vantzou)
09 “Marion” (Sarah Davachi)
10 “Night vision, it touched my neck” (Felicia Atkinson)
11 “Indiana Blindfold” (JAB)
12 “The Circle” (Chihei Hatakeyama)
13 “Torpor” (Ben Lukas Boysen)
14 “Between The Hawthorn And Extinction” (Stuart Hyatt, Player Piano, Julien Marchal)
Ultrasonic is out 5/1 on Temporary Residence Ltd.