Field Works - Cedars - a concept album about forests, but in two distinct halves: Arabic poetry spoken and sung by Youmna Saba over ambient tracks, and poetry in English spoken by H.C. McEntire over Americana
The mystifying 9th album in the Field Works series, Cedars combines cosmic Americana with Western ambient and Middle Eastern influences. Delicate layers of pedal steel, banjo, oud, and hurdy-gurdy float atop looping guitar drones to create a soothing, atmospheric chamber where folk and electronic music coalesce. Set to Arabic and English poetry, the song cycle examines some of Earth’s most iconic and ancient forests, revealing our complicated relationship with the natural world. For this special dual-language release, Field Works producer Stuart Hyatt has assembled a supergroup of musicians, poets, and artists. The album is narrated by Youmna Saba and H.C. McEntire. Instrumentalists include Marisa Anderson, Fadi Tabbal, Dena El Saffar, Danny Paul Grody, Bob Hoffnar, Tomás Lozano, Nathan Bowles, Alex Roldan, Youmna Saba, and Stuart Hyatt. Renowned illustrator María Medem brings poems by Todd Fleming Davis and Youmna Saba to life in the accompanying full-color Risograph comic book; and longtime Field Works collaborators PRINTtEXT design the packaging.
A double LP of ambient soundscapes using the echolocations of the endangered Indiana bat as source material? Hell yes — why not? This year is already weird enough, let’s make it weirder (in a good way). Field Works is an ongoing project from Stuart Hyatt (you can read more about him in this excellent recent New York Times article) and for Ultrasonic, he’s gathered together an all-star cast — Mary Lattimore, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Noveller and Sarah Davachi among them. They all essentially duet with the strange chirps and whirs of bats, sometimes creating soothing sonic landscapes, sometimes finding high drama within these natural reverberations. From Dusk to Dawn, it all hangs together perfectly ...
Deciduous
Filmed and Edited by Anna Powell Denton
Art Direction by Stuart Hyatt
Music by Field Works
Filmed in a single take at Green's Bluff Nature Preserve, a 563-acre wooded habitat in Owen County, Indiana. Protected by the Nature Conservancy in partnership with the Indiana Department of Nature Preserves & Indiana Heritage Trust.
Ecology
Filmed and Directed by Stuart Hyatt
Edited by Asa Gauen
Music by Field Works
Filmed at Crown Hill North Woods, with citizen arborists trying to prevent it’s imminent razing.
What Is The City Hiding
Filmed and Edited by Jonathan Frey
Art Direction by Stuart Hyatt
Music by Field Works
Filmed along Pogue’s Run in Indianapolis, an urban waterway that descends into and transects the city’s underworld.
Stuart Hyatt is a Grammy-nominated artist and musician. He creates interdisciplinary creative projects about our complicated relationship with the natural world. Hyatt is the producer of Field Works, the collaborative series in which experimental musicians transform audio field recordings into music.
Each album follows a rigorous conceptual framework - incorporating scientific data and site-based field work - but emerges as a simple, emotionally evocative musical story. This body of work is released via the Brooklyn-based record label Temporary Residence and published by the Dutch imprint Jap Sam Books.
As a National Geographic Explorer, Hyatt is expanding this music into new frequencies: producing records using the ultrasonic echolocations of endangered bats and the infrasonic rumblings of seismic activity.
Hyatt is also a songwriter and producer of left field pop and folk music, producing work with amateur community participants and non-professionals. He is a member of M12 Studio, the arts collective known for projects that explore public space, rural cultures and landscapes. He works independently via commission as Stuart Hyatt Studio, LLC. He lives in Indianapolis with his family.
I create albums, books, exhibitions, and live performances that seek to bring new audiences into uncharted sonic territories, encouraging a closer listen and more thoughtful attention to the voice of a fragile planet.
Bats are not very popular right now. They’ve received an inordinate amount of blame for the coronavirus, which was not their fault; and as a result, we feel kind of sorry for them. Thankfully, we’re able to make up for it a little by showcasing this bat-themed album from Stuart Hyatt and a host of our favorite friends. Ultrasonic is the 8th Field Works album, arriving on the heels of last…
Stuart Hyatt and Eluvium chase the Indiana bat on Field Works’ graceful “Dusk Tempi”. The composition is part of Ultrasonic, Hyatt’s eighth project as Field Works, due out May 1 via Temporary Residence Ltd.
The starting point for each composition on Ultrasonic, the eighth album in Stuart Hyatt's Field Works series, is the endangered Indiana bat. Hyatt has spent the past year following the bats, collecting field recordings that he then turned over to some of the world's best ambient musicians as part of an ambitious multi-disciplinary storytelling initiative funded by the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute and the National Geographic Society. The first of those compositions, premiering above, is the Eluvium collaboration "Dusk Tempi," a minimal piece that slowly folds in the bats' echolocations as Matthew Cooper's strings loop hypnotically in the foreground.
"Such an honor to be working with Eluvium again," Hyatt wrote in an email to The FADER. "'Dusk Tempi' is one of the most deeply evocative compositions I’ve ever heard from him, particularly the way the bats become instruments in their own right. Listen carefully — right at the 3:37 mark — as the bats’ plaintive calls take over. It just tears my heart open in the happiest way. I’ve spent the past year outside with my microphones chasing this endangered species through forest and field; I hope 'Dusk Tempi' brings the listener into that same magical world."
Ultrasonic is out on May 1 via Temporary Residence Ltd. On top of the Elivium collaboration, the album features contributions from Christina Vantzou, Sarah Davachi, Ben Lukas Boysen, Machinefabriek, Mary Lattimore, Felicia Atkinson, Noveller, Chihei Hatakeyama, John Also Bennett, Kelly Moran, Taylor Deupree, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Julien Marchal, and Player Piano. Each copy of the album will come with a printed copy of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Pre-order the album here and find its full tracklist below.
The FADER shares “Dusk Tempi” from Stuart Hyatt’s ambient ‘Field Works’ series!
“The starting point for each composition on Ultrasonic, the eighth album in Stuart Hyatt's Field Works series, is the endangered Indiana bat. Hyatt has spent the past year following the bats, collecting field recordings that he then turned over to some of the world's best ambient musicians as part of an ambitious multi-disciplinary storytelling initiative funded by the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute and the National Geographic Society.” Listen to the collaborative track with Eluvium HERE
