The musicians turning bat calls into club music

Echo in the Dark, by artists Hanna Tuulikki and Tommy Perman, transforms the ultrasonic calls of eight bat species into electronic music, blending translated bat recordings with the human voice.

Normally beyond the range of human hearing, the calls have been made audible using heterodyne bat detectors, revealing clicks, buzzes and rhythms that can sound surprisingly close to electronic music.

The project began in 2022, when Hospitalfield, an arts venue in Arbroath, Scotland, commissioned Tuulikki to make work inspired by bats after running community bat walks during the Covid lockdowns. She proposed dance music made from echolocation sounds and invited Perman to collaborate.

“It was an easy yes from me,” said Perman, who has long used electronic music to fuse natural sounds with other instruments. “What you hear is extraordinary – clicks, buzzes, rhythms and warbles that could easily be mistaken for samples from electronic dance music. That realisation felt like an invitation we couldn’t ignore.”

The pair made some recordings themselves, gathered others through an open call, and worked with Tayside Bat Group, eventually collecting sounds from 13 of the UK’s 18 bat species. Eight of those species feature on the finished album, their calls processed into beats, melodies and textures, with Tuulikki’s voice woven through them to create what the artists describe as a human-bat hybrid sound world.

Perman said he had wrongly assumed the species would sound broadly similar, but found the variety “astounding”. “The lesser horseshoe bat produces the most beautiful rippling calls that wouldn’t be out of place on a dub record, while the Daubenton’s bat creates amazing syncopated rhythms that sound like a jazz drummer,” he told Positive News.

The first version of the project became a series of outdoor “silent bat raves”, where audiences danced through headphones at dusk while bats few above them. Now the music has been reworked as a full-length vinyl and digital album, released on 28 August through Glasgow independent label KIN-TU.

The artists hope the record can do more than surprise listeners. Bats are crucial to ecosystems, but remain surrounded by unease and superstition. Perman said he was shocked by a recent Bat Conservation Trust survey which found that 46% of people in the UK hold negative feelings about them.

The lesser horseshoe bat produces calls that wouldn’t sound out of place on a dub record

Echo in the Dark is not trying to change that through a lecture. “Dance music has always been a space where people can come together, lose themselves in the moment, and feel part of something bigger,” said Perman. “We hope the album can use that power to nurture a different kind of relationship with the more-than-human world – one rooted in curiosity and care rather than fear.”

The dream, he said, is simple: for someone who has never given bats much thought to put on the record and come away feeling differently. “If it sends even a handful of listeners out into the night to listen for bats, or to support bat conservation, that feels like a genuinely positive outcome.”

Main image: Lawrence Winram