In the late 1980s I shared a flat in Hull with a performance artist called Si. We often spoke of creating a music collective which would take all its riffs from bat echolocation. He works in crypto currency now. I worry about my energy bill. Those blind flying mammals who, like dolphins, use animal radar to navigate their way through the world have long held a fascination for artists. From Claude Debussy and William Shakespeare’s interpretations of bats as convenors of ‘depression’ or ‘freedom’, to the more recent vile posturing of Russian artist Petr Davydtchenko’s live bat-eating protest against ‘big pharma’, the mysterious rhythms and frequencies that bats emit keeps leading artists back to their colonies.

An obvious precedent for British-Finnish artist, composer and performer Hanna Tuulikki’s Echo In The Dark, a sweetly engaging ‘silent bat rave’ and ‘love letter to dance music’ lies with Memory Bucket, the film that won Jeremy Deller the Turner Prize in 2004. Deller’s wandering portrait of the Texas birthplace of George Bush (Sr) and site of the Waco massacre partly centres on a bat colony cave and follows their glorious setting-sun murmuration. More precisely, it is Deller’s revisiting of this work in 2017 for the Cologne-based Brückenmusik arts festival in which he recontextualised it in accordance with dub music with all its reverbs and panoramic delays (just as bats do) with an exclusive soundtrack from DJ Adrian Sherwood that is the real benchmark for Tuulikki’s joyous if hardly original work. 

Arbroath arts centre Hospitalfield is home to one of Angus’ many bat colonies and it’s here that Tuulikki and her team performed their 90-minute set to a small group (it’s unclear why numbers are so limited) of middle-class art wonks, aged ravers and Gen Xers all looking for a shiver of pantheistic euphoria possibly brought on by that point where the natural world and rave culture meet. 

^{Pictures: Tiu Makkonen}

Standing in a damp, silent campsite round the back of a historic site, with headphones connected to a receiver trying to differentiate the sounds of the common and soprano pipistrelle from those of the lesser horseshoe bat may not be everyone’s idea of fun. But Tuulikki and co are here to put on a climate catastrophe-diverting show and their execution is faultless. With her musical collaborator Tommy Perman, Tuulikki’s samples bat calls (gathered by communities across Angus) and spoken-word extracts from renowned ecological philosopher Timothy Morton merge with dance music to build and escalate the movement and feelings of the audience. 

The pace is kept in the heart of this bopping audience by a gifted group of dancers marshalled with skill and feeling by movement director Will Dickie. Really strong laser lighting design by Jack Wrigley and supplementary costumes and animation by Tuulikki and Perman elevates this unique event into something moving, uplifting and memorable with a finale that’s well worth the wait.

Reviewed at Hospitalfield, Arbroath; Hanna Tuulikki and Tommy Perman’s Echo In The Dark EP is available on various streaming platforms.