Reconfiguring a Sonic Space
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on defunct Central Indiana arts website Sky Blue Window on September 11, 2015
“I rarely do live performances,” Stuart Hyatt says. “Almost never.” This is an odd statement coming from a former Grammy nominee carrying two recently released records under his arm.
The statement proves less contradictory the more familiar one becomes with Hyatt’s work. He is in the process of releasing the second in a five-album series under the name of Field Works. For each album, Hyatt collects field recordings from a specific place. Those recordings are then offered up to musicians of Hyatt’s choosing, who take the sonic building blocks and transform them into original compositions.
Photo courtesy of Jonathan Frey
“What I do is I exchange files with other musicians and we kind of build it from there,” Hyatt says. “So, I can’t take personal credit for a lot of the music. It’s more like commissioning.”
“I’ve always been kind of a hack, self-trained musician,” Hyatt says. “I played in bands a long time ago, but I’m pretty untrained. I can’t read music — typical, electric guitar in the bedroom with a cassette four-track, and that never went away. So, I continually found myself trying to integrate that spirit into these more formalized art projects.”
The National Road was the first album in the Field Works series, and it featured the sounds of Washington Street in Indianapolis. “This one is all over the place, because it was my first one,” Hyatt says of the album. “I was really in a rush, and worked with a lot of different people. So, there are things that are bordering on ballads. Then there’s spoken word. There’s this one really weird, almost like a rap battle between this emcee and this homeless guy. So, this is all over the place.”
Courtesy of Jonathan Frey
Filmmaker Jonathan Frey has collaborated with Hyatt to create a visual accompaniment to the Field Works albums. “Stuart is wonderful, and he is great,” Frey says. “He’s a hustler, and really brings together phenomenal artists and musicians and has a really unique vision to bring these people together. He’s always creating.”
For the second installment, Hyatt collected sounds from Indianapolis’ Pogue’s Run. The National Science Foundation funded the album, an opportunity that arose out of the place-based arts and science learning project Streamlines. The album’s A-side is designed to literally follow the course of the stream from the source, through the city, into the tunnel where it was buried by Indy’s infrastructure. The B-side of Pogue’s Run focuses on the fiction and narratives that have emerged about Pogue’s Run over the years.
“To me, Pogue’s Run is that tension between the natural and the manmade,” Hyatt says.
Courtesy of Jonathan Frey
The final track of the album features a story by Indianapolis novelist Ben Winters that imagines if George Pogue, the man for whom the stream was named, came back to life to discover the modern metropolis atop his namesake.
Local actor Rich Komenich narrates Winters’ story and the recording features guitar by renowned Nashville picker William Tyler. Frey’s film for Pogue’s Run serves as the visual accompaniment to the final track of the LP.
“Track six doesn’t make a lot of sense until you watch this film that we shot in the tunnel, which we’re going to premiere at LUNA,” Hyatt says. “So, this is actually just the kind of outtake soundtrack to that film. The film is really awesome. I’m so excited.”
Courtesy of Jonathan Frey
On Sunday, LUNA Music will host the album release party for the Pogue’s Run project. The festivities will feature a premiere of Frey’s short film, which Hyatt, Tyler and Komenich will accompany as a sort of live soundtrack. It will be the first and only time the music will be performed in a live setting.
“I’m going to sit there with a keyboard and trigger some samples just so I can say I played with him,” Hyatt says of Tyler.
The three subsequent Field Works albums will be released within the next 18 months, all on Hyatt’s own label Team Records. The next release is currently in the works, and it features sounds collected in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s tentatively titled Born in the Ear.
Last month Hyatt spent an extensive amount of time at the Indiana State Fair collecting sounds for the fourth LP, a “wacky, dance record” entitled The Fair State. If everything goes as planned, that album will drop during the State Fair next year. The final installment of the Field Works series will attempt to imagine earth, post-humanity. Hyatt has yet to decide how he will form the recordings for such an endeavor.
Courtesy of Jonathan Frey
As is evident, Hyatt is nothing if not ambitious. He’s also not concerned with the commercial appeal of the individual or collective releases. Hyatt finances the projects through grants and foundations, which allow him to pay the artists he collaborates with up front.
I don’t tour. I don’t have a band,” Hyatt says. “There’s no me to promote. These are art projects. I consider them something different. It’s just an opportunity to work with really amazing people.”
Learn more about Sunday’s Pogue’s Run release at LUNA Music via Facebook.
Written by Rob Peoni
EP Review: Homeboy Sandman ‘All That I Hold Dear’
It has only been 19 months since Stones Throw Records released Homeboy Sandman’s Subject Matter EP, his first project for the L.A. based label. But because of all the material he’s put out in that short time span (4 EPs, 1 LP), it feels like he’s been there a lot longer. The most recent EP, All That I Hold Dear, is his second EP of the year, following the outstanding release Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent. Like Fertile Crescent, All That I Hold Dear features one producer throughout. This time Sandman enlists M. Slago, a little-known producer he previously worked with on his album The Good Sun. Homeboy Sandman really seems to have found his groove with the EP format and choosing to stick with one producer for his last couple projects have made them the most cohesive works of his career.
As the title suggests, All That I Hold Dear is a personal affair. Homeboy Sandman has never been afraid to write about his personal life, but M. Slago’s understated, soulful compositions set the table nicely for Sandman to write some songs that capture the same aesthetic that Slago achieves behind the boards. Because of this, the EP feels like a welcome downshift from his usual intricate, in-your-face rhyming style. There are still plenty of the creative and skillful rhyme schemes that Sandman is known for, but on this EP in particular he sounds less focused on proving himself as an MC than ever before. Songs like “King Kong Got Nothing On Me” and “In A Daze” feature simple but effective choruses that sound meant for M. Slago’s beats, and verses that largely consist of playful boasts. While the songs aren’t nearly as ambitious as some of Sandman’s material, they stand out as memorable songs and are prime examples of Sandman’s versatility and ability to make any kind of hip hop song sound fresh.
The EP’s standout song “Musician” is one of my favorite songs of the year and instantly one of my favorites in Homeboy Sandman’s catalog. He uses the song to address the notion that a large portion of the world doesn’t view him as a musician because he’s a rapper. When Sandman raps “16 bars, 3 verses long/ it’s the output of Beatles album in one song/ No disrespect to Bob Dylan, but show respect for Madvillain” he’s speaking for a lot of people who treat hip hop like the amazing art form that it is, but are frustrated to continuously see its name dragged through the gutter. In the third verse Sandman pens some of the best bars of his career, summing up the existence of a modern hip hop artist from the inside, as well as the outside- “Musicians be amongst the greatest in the world/ but caught up in a game that’s being degraded by the world/ even though it’s imitated by the world/ don’t ask me why I’m jaded by the world”.
Homeboy Sandman has always been able to condense complex ideas and emotions into straightforward lyrics that are easily relatable, and “Musician” is certainly not the only example of this on All That I Hold Dear. He has put out several great relationship/dating based songs in the last couple years and “Relapse” follows that trend. He compares a failing relationship to a junkie who has kicked the habit and keeps finding reasons to relapse. Not only is it an interesting angle to use to write about a relationship, but features another fantastic hook sung by Homeboy Sandman that really gives the song a classic feel. His vulnerable musings on the tricks the relationship has played on him fit perfectly with M. Slago’s soulful piano based beat and really puts the listener in Homeboy Sandman’s shoes. He goes even deeper in analyzing his relationships with women and his mentality as a musician on “Knock.” The song features a great guest appearance by Gob Goblin, but Sandman makes sure that he doesn’t get outshined. He starts the first verse by stating that he wants “a girl darker than me” before contradicting himself and revealing at the start of his second verse that “I had a girl lighter than me since I wrote that.” The honesty continues as Sandman analyzes how the intense, bordering-on-arrogant, belief in himself and his music might make relationships (both romantic and with fans) difficult, but he remains “content to shoot warning shots over your head” and stay true to himself.
Even though Homeboy Sandman hasn’t released a full length project yet in 2013, with the two EP’s he has dropped he has put himself squarely in the conversation for the best rapper of the year. As he raps on “Musician,” “I’m not concerned with being the best or being better than you, I’m concerned with better than me”. Competing with himself has been good for Homeboy Sandman and forces him to adjust his approach on each and every release. While an uncompromising musician like Sandman may never receive the respect he truly deserves, he sounds like he’s having more fun making music than ever before, and might be settling into an artistic zone that could last a while. Just like Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, All That I Hold Dear is being released on vinyl and is a unique opportunity for record collectors to pick up a great piece of vinyl for only 9.99. Check out the EP release single that Sandman put out to commemorate All That I Hold Dear’s release below as well.
Also, Indianapolis residents have a unique opportunity to catch Homeboy Sandman on tour with fellow Thought On Tracks favorite Open Mike Eagle a week from today at Sabbatical in Broad Ripple. Tickets are only 10 bucks and considering Sandman and Mike Eagle’s reputations as outstanding live performers, this is one hip hop show you don’t want to miss.
Connect with Homeboy Sandman via Facebook
Written by John Bugbee
Thought on Tracks 
Gone Writing…
Wondering where we’ve gone? Both John and Rob are writing over at We Listen For You. Rob is also still writing about Indiana music for Musical Family Tree and contributing more general arts features to Sky Blue Window. Thanks for reading and engaging with us over the last couple of years. We hope you will continue the conversation.
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