‘Raving and dance music can offer a space to harness radical hope for the future.’ Glasgow-based artist, musician and vocalist Hanna Tuulikki is talking about Echo In The Dark, a sonic and performance project which culminates in a series of silent raves. Kicking off at Arbroath’s Hospitalfield before touring further afield, participants will dance to the rhythms and frequencies of bat calls.

Sadly, Tuulikki hasn’t joined our interview in her bat-rave costume, which consists of brilliant bat-like prosthetics, neon make-up and a tie-dyed tracksuit. She elaborates, exuberantly communicating her belief that humans must find a way to co-exist ecologically with their mammal kin. Tommy Perman, her musical collaborator for Echo In The Dark, offers his agreement. ‘Me and Hanna have a shared belief that we are not separate from nature.’ This notion of human-animal hybridity permeates Tuulikki’s beautiful and exploratory work; for instance, in Seals’kin, her film from earlier this year, she uses her body to ruminate on what it might mean to ‘become-with-seal’ by delving into the myths of selkies.  

^{Pictures: Laurence Winram}

Echo In The Dark has emerged from a series of fruitful encounters and strange synchronicities. In 2020, Hospitalfield teamed up with Tayside Bat Group to hold bat walks at dusk, and also piloted a bat-detector lending library; members of the public could borrow equipment which analysed the sound waves of ultrasonic bat calls as well as revealed which species they had encountered. Recognising the resonances with Tuulikki’s practice, Hospitalfield approached the artist to develop a project on bats and, coincidentally, the idea of focusing on an echolocation dance space was already brewing in her mind. 

Deeply invested in the bat-rave world they have created, the pair generously take the time to explain the fundamentals of echolocation to me. Bats emit ultrasonic pulses to build up a picture of their environment when hunting for food, with their sounds too high-pitched for most humans to hear. Echo In The Dark uses specialist equipment and a technique called heterodyning which essentially converts bat sounds by pitching them down a few octaves, thereby making them audible to human ears. The process is ‘a hybrid of bat and human ingenuity’, says Perman, who describes the recordings as a kind of ‘portrait of places’, adding, ‘people also do echolocation all the time, but we’re not really aware of it. It’s so instinctive for any human in a tunnel or a church to make a large sound to hear what kind of echo it makes.’ 

Mimesis, the imitation of sounds and movements, is a prominent theme within Tuulikki’s research-led, multi-disciplinary practice. During the process of developing Echo In The Dark, Tuulikki was moved to create a rave experience based on how bat echolocation calls sound. ‘Their clicks, their buzzes and rhythms could be mistaken for electronic dance music,’ insists Tuulikki before she takes a moment to credit a vital source of inspiration (the philosopher Timothy Morton) who has written extensively about ecological awareness. Tuulikki reads out a statement from Morton’s work in which they describe how ‘dance music reveals a process of becoming aware . . . of what is called “present” is in fact this pulsating, vibrating, moving without travelling thing, or group of things flowing to their own rhythm.’ 

The silent bat raves are accompanied by the release of a 7” lathe-cut EP, featuring a new set of dance tracks derived from the echolocation calls and infused with Tuulikki’s mesmerising voice. The EP, which Tuulikki describes as both a ‘visceral’ and an ‘intimate’ way to tune bat sounds, was driven by a community-focused exercise. In collaboration with Hospitalfield, Tuulikki gathered public submissions of echolocation recordings; these contributions include 14 of the 18 bat species in the UK. Morton also appears on the tracks as a special guest. 

By the way Tuulikki and Perman feed off each other, it is clear that the silent bat raves are going to be memorable. To create Echo In The Dark, they have wholeheartedly dived into a hybrid bat world, but also left plenty of room for laughter and joy as they joke about What We Do In The Shadows and how they’re unable to say the word ‘bat’ normally anymore.

‘Our hybrid bat world is going to meet a new audience and we don’t know how that interaction will pan out,’ notes Tuulikki. Audience participation will open up a new dimension to Echo In The Dark, where human sounds and movements are not hindered by social constrictions. Through music and technology, Tuulikki seeks to remove the bodily boundaries between human ravers sweating on the ground and winged bats soaring through the sky. 

Echo In The Dark, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, Thursday 8–Saturday 10 September.