Kilometre Club 'At Dusk Hour the Crickets' [CD]

Digipak, edition of 50.

Incorporates sounds recorded in Oro-Medonte ON, September 2022
Written and recorded by Daniel Field
Mastered by Ian Hawgood

At Dusk Hour The Crickets is a quiet album of nature ambient that oscillates between the land and the sky.

Its creation began with me leaving my field recorder on top of my car on a warm night in September 2022, at a friend's house a couple of hours north of Toronto. My family was sitting around a campfire, admiring a bright moon, and embracing the very end of the summer. Eventually when I listened back to the recording, I was impressed by the richness and movement of the recording, featuring cricket sounds mixed with the wind, the chatter of my friends and our children, and at one point, the sound of a faraway train. I popped the recording into my DAW and started to explore what I wanted to do with it.

In the past when I have embedded field recordings into my music, I've composed tracks and then searched for the right recording to add after. For this album, I composed and layered synth played directly with the recordings, trying to find the right tones and timbres to match the sounds as they were occuring. The entire recording features the same 15 synth presets played across different tracks, usually with no more than 2 or 3 stems per song. The result is a series of recordings that feel relaxing and meditative yet still just slightly distant. Thanks to the expert mastering from Ian Hawgood, the pads feel warm and inviting, and the field recordings are perfectly balanced. The thirteen tracks here are designed to flow all as one - a concise 35 minute journey.

The album begins with loping synth pads, with the field recording slowly fading in as the song develops. Towards the end, the field recording slowly fades, leaving the feeling of drifting far away from the ground. The album's title is inspired by one of my all-time favourite albums, 'At Rush Hour The Cars' by Guelph folk group Royal City. That album's beauty comes in its spare, simple, and raw songwriting, and I'd like to think that this collection has found influence from some of those elements. The album cover is a photo I took on the same night, with friends and family looking through a telescope to see the beyond. So here I present to you At Dusk Hour The Crickets, a soundtrack to the connection between the earth and the sky.

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