Music of the climate drama. Music project fyield premieres single Candy from their upcoming album.

What does our uncertainty in the times of the climate crises sound like? Brand new music project fyield that brings together Czech and Icelandic musicians comes up with the premiere single Candy from their forthcoming album. fyield takes listeners to industrial sites that are key to the functioning of our civilisation and invites nature and technologies to become their full-fledged bandmates.

How come that the seemingly calm flow of vapors from the Earth are processed by such a dramatically roaring technology? Only the sound reveals what is happening under the ground. These were the first impressions that struck singer-songwriter Václav Havelka and filmmaker Ivo Bystřičan when they arrived at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant in Iceland where the experimental deposition of CO2 takes place. They spent one day listening and recording in the company of the legendary Icelandic field recordist Magnús Bergsson. Sounds of shafts, hot air rushing through pipes and steam coming out from the Earth. As a result they produced a fierce breakbeat track called Candy that is topped off with a lyrical guitar passage accompanied by the gurgling of water and the sound of a running engine.

Candy heralds fyield’s upcoming music album, at the same time being a crucial part of the interdisciplinary project Future Landscapes, which will combine music with documentary film, podcasts and a series of lectures with environmental themes. The band itself brings together leading figures from the Czech and Icelandic indie music scene. On the Czech side are Václav Havelka and Kryštof Kříček from the band Please The Trees, and they are joined by Pan Thorarensen of the Icelandic ambient trio Stereo Hypnosis, who is also the founder of the experimental music festival Extreme Chill, which he has been organizing in Reykjavik since 2010.
Together they are finishing an album that fuses music composed of sounds from selected natural and industrial locations in the Czech and Icelandic landscapes with electronics, beats and music instruments. The music of fyield takes the listeners to places that are crucial to the functioning of contemporary civilization. The recording took place in eight locations in Iceland and the Czech Republic where our society finds vital resources including electricity and gropes to find methods that would slow down the arrival of the climate collapse. The recordings were made using improvisation, field research and field recording methods. Listening to their tracks, we find ourselves near or in the bowels of a geothermal, hydroelectric or coal power plant, an aquaponic farm, a lagoon created by the melting of a glacier, a volcano, CO2 underground depository or an oil extraction site – fyield translates the factors and consequences of how human actions often inadvertently affect climate change into a unique and captivating sound form.
“We left it to experts and politicians to deal with the changes of our planet. But this left no space for imagination that could build social demand and creative solutions,” says documentary filmmaker Ivo Bystřičan on why he and Václav Havelka decided to embark on a work in which sound plays a major role. During the creative process Havelka, Thoraransen and Kříček approached the composition with the sensitivity of songwriters, but also with regard to the inspiration of inviting nature and technologies to become equal bandmates and give them space to be heard. “Climate change is something we are already experiencing. It’s a statement,” Havelka sums up. “These are the sounds of a catastrophe nearing, and we found it important to capture the urgency of the situation. These soundscapes introduce a so far unknown dimension of the experience and invite us to think about it, rather than to make it sound attractive.”