Now bats what I call music...

A UNIQUE and intimate musical performance will be held in the Black Mountains this month featuring an artist, a musician and a cave full of thousands of bats.

Noctule will see Stefhan Caddick and Farm Hand – the solo project from Mark Daman Thomas of Welsh band Islet and founder of Shape Records – and the bats that inhabit the huge cave network at Eglwys Faen, a cave entrance set within the 400 miles of passages beneath former limestone quarry Llangattock Escarpement performing to just 15 people at a time.

Equipped with a bat detector, cameras and an array of other gadgets, Stefhan and Mark have spent the last month quietly working in the fading light of the Black Mountains’ cave system recording the sounds of their natural surroundings.

The duo have returned to the surface to invite Green Man Festival early arrivals who are staying at the festival’s Settler’s Pass site, to an underground sound and light performance that will be experienced by an intimate audience who will be outnumbered by an unseen audience of protected lesser horseshoe bats.

Stefhan and Mark will use the natural acoustic properties of the cave to generate amplification equal to that inside the world’s most imposing religious buildings.

The sounds of echolocation amongst the resident bats, undetectable by human ear, have been gathered using specialist equipment, recorded alongside the sounds of falling water, moving rocks and the slow emergence of cavers entering the artist’s workspace from deep within the network.

Noctule is a special commission from Peak – an initiative devised by Arts Alive Wales to develop opportunities for contemporary art in the Black Mountains and Welsh Borders – for the Green Man Festival.

It will be premiered on Tuesday, August 16, in Eglwys Faen. A film of the performance will be premiered at Green Man just two days later.

For more information about the project and the work of Peak visit www.peakart.org.uk

Green Man Festival is held between August 18-21.