Stuart Hyatt has built a fascinating career for himself. As a National Geographic Explorer, Hyatt travels around, making field recordings of different locations, getting sonic records of both natural phenomena and the ambient sounds of human life. But Hyatt also releases music under the name Field Works, working together with musicians like Pantha Du Prince and Dan Deacon to turn those sounds that he captures into music. A couple of years ago, Hyatt released a seven-disc Field Works box set called Metaphonics: The Complete Field Works Recordings. Later this year, he’ll also release a new double LP with a very particular subject.

On the forthcoming Ultrasonic, Hyatt and his collaborators build music out of Hyatt’s field recordings of the Indiana bat. It’s part of a broader Hyatt project about the endangered bat species, and it uses the echolocation sounds of the animals as sonic source material. Hyatt’s collaborators on the album include producers like Mary Lattimore, Noveller, and Kelly Moran. On lead single “Dusk Tempi,” Hyatt works with Eluvium, Portland composer Matthew Cooper’s long-running acoustic-ambient project.

On the six-minute “Dusk Tempi,” Cooper — who released the Eluvium album Pianoworks last year — builds a humming, slow-building crescendo around the whirr-bleep noises of those bats looking for food at night. Since Cooper’s work already seems in tune with nature, it’s an inspired team-up, and those bat sounds add something uncanny to the music. In director Anna Powell Teeter’s video, we see Hyatt out in the world, capturing those sounds. Check it out below, along with the tracklist for Ultrasonic.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Dusk Temp” (Eluvium)
02 “Silver Secrets” (Mary Lattimore)
03 “Night Swimming” (Jefre Cantu-Ledesma)
04 “Kelelawar” (Machinefabriek)
05 “Sodalis” (Kelly Moran)
06 “Echo Affinity” (Taylor Deupree)
07 “A Place Both Wonderful And Strange” (Noveller)
08 “Music for a room with vaulted ceiling” (Christina Vantzou)
09 “Marion” (Sarah Davachi)
10 “Night vision, it touched my neck” (Felicia Atkinson)
11 “Indiana Blindfold” (JAB)
12 “The Circle” (Chihei Hatakeyama)
13 “Torpor” (Ben Lukas Boysen)
14 “Between The Hawthorn And Extinction” (Stuart Hyatt, Player Piano, Julien Marchal)

Ultrasonic is out 5/1 on Temporary Residence Ltd.