After some more preparation in the afternoon, at 8pm – the audience started to arrive at St Cuthbert’s Hall, Bedford. As they filtered in, we served them with some mulled wine and Matt Olden had set up a 10 channel surround sound system that was randomly moving recordings of Bats around the space. 

The opening piece was the choir performing the 3 sections we’d worked out on the 4th with by ambient guitar from Ban Salmons. It went really well and the moody blue lighting with the projected light trails made it really atmospheric. The choir members were brilliant, and even though we’d only really fixed the structure a few days before, we had spent many sessions experimenting, which meant ideas from the process came out in the performance. I particularly enjoyed the last section which was ‘free improv’ because somehow it naturally felt like animal calls, but not too explicitly. The singers started to interact much more with the audience, (which was the first time this had been possible) so it became more ‘readable’ in terms of what the Bat-box was actually doing to the singers voices. I was super-pleased and I hope the choir enjoyed it too.

Here is a short video I’ve edited from extracts filmed by Tom Wild.  It’s difficult to capture on film and the space was very reverberant so the audio recording sounds more murky on than it was experiencing it live – but hopefully it gives an idea about how it was.  

Following that  - Kerry Andrew improvised with the device, again dueting with Ben Salmons on guitar. This created a wonderful opportunity for Kerry to interact with audience members creating a quiet, subtle, and more intimate piece. She then took to the stage and performed a captivating solo set as You Are Wolf, – songs inspired by bird folklore which was the perfect compliment to the vocal migrations

To round off the evening we had a cafe scientifique – hosted by Quentin Cooper  - presenter of BBC Radio 4′s Material World. I felt it was important to have a discussion about the science behind the piece, and Quentin was the perfect host, connecting our thoughts and comment with appropriate and interesting questions and prompts. Joining myself and Quentin was Bob Cornes from Bedfordshire Bat Group, Dawn Giles from Bedford Creative Arts, Matthew Olden (programmer) and Ali Goodyear who was one of the singers in the choir. We discussed the ideas behind the piece being inspired by Bats echo locating, and there were a good amount of questions from the audience too which created a really stimulating and lively dicussion.

All photos with this post by Graham.