Hello Satellites There's a Field

Melbourne based songwriter, musician and producer, Eva Popov is thrilled to finally reveal the entirety of her long-awaited fourth studio album as Hello Satellites with There's a Field and offer a penultimate single with the album's expansive title-track. Released via Ditto today, the album features 2020 single 'Thief', as well as recent electro-pop jam, 'No Delivery' and last month's rhythmic mantra, 'Water Salt Light Grace'. Now Hello Satellites is rounding out the final quadrant in a series of holistic album gems with the LP's title track and final single, 'There's a Field' and is gearing up to launch the record with a pair of intimate live performances at Melbourne venue, Tempo Rubato and the Northern Arts Hotel in Castlemaine.
 
"This song, like all of my songwriting, searches for the place of belonging and healing that is elusive. It is the place of meeting and being met full heartedly, it is the place where loss is recovered, it is a place that exists somewhere between fiction and reality. We may experience flashes of this place in moments - in the natural world, in ourselves, in a beloved, in memories, yet we are continually shaken back into a reality where we are lost and searching. This song is about the search for wholeness." – Eva Popov, Hello Satellites

From pop tracks revelling in the joy of retro synths and punchy drum machines, to tender guitar-and-piano-based meditations on hope and recovery, There's a Field is an expansive love letter to the mythical and real places we can heal. Produced by Eva and mixed by long-time collaborator Nick Huggins (Seagull; Dirty Three), the album was recorded primarily at Eva's home, shaped by the limitations of a long Melbourne lockdown. "Each song was a joyous, wide open space to occupy, whilst the outside world felt so closed and restricted under lockdown", Eva recalls.

Vocals were sung at night in a walk-in wardrobe. Guitar and piano takes were recorded in the quiet, stolen moments of working motherhood. Friends were invited to hum along over the internet to build a virtual choir. "I got lonely working alone with a computer screen. The song 'Friend' is about feeling supported by invisible forces, so I reached out on social media to see if anyone wanted to hum along. The response was overwhelming, and interestingly the people who emailed over their humming weren't musicians or even people I knew that well. They just offered up their sounds, and I layered them into the track". Other musical guests include Seth Rees (drums), Carl Panuzzo (vocals), Cathryn Kohn (strings and accordion), Magdalenna Krstevska (clarinet) and Flora Carbo (saxophone).

Despite the adventurous and genre-defying production, Eva maintains that There's a Field is a folk album at heart. "How will I find healing? How will I find a sense of home? This album falls back on the long tradition of folk music that asks the questions, searches for answers, and tells the stories that rattle around in the secret spaces of the heart." 

Eva will be celebrating the release of There's a Field with two special, intimate performances at Tempo Rubato on Thursday 27 May and the Northern Arts Hotel in Castlemaine on Saturday 29 May. The album will be reinvented using acoustic strings, piano and voice. Be prepared to sing and be sung to amongst songs that dream of wide open spaces and the heart's capacity to heal.