MUSICIAN LAUNCHES ALBUM OF 'WAKE-UP CALLS'
London-based musician, composer and producer, Cosmos Sheldrake, has released a new album (18th September 2020) called, 'Wake Up Calls', a title intended to alert us as well as to entertain. As he says, "I hope that this music may serve as a wake up call to help us become more aware of the glorious polyphonic soundworlds that surround us before they become extinct."
Released through his own label 'Tardigrade Records', Cosmos, the son of biologist Rupert Sheldrake and voice teacher Jill Purce and brother of mycologist Merlin, spent over 9 years developing a series of pieces composed entirely from recordings of endangered British birds, which now form his next full-length album.
Starting at night with a Nightjar and a Nightingale, the music progresses, track by track, through dawn and the day, around to the evening chorus and back to night with another Nightingale and an Owl. Sheldrake says he couldn't help but also include a recording of a Sheldrake, "The bird that my family is named after, which is also on the amber list'.
Cuckoo Song is composed by Benjamin Britten and features the sound of a Cuckoo singing above Britten's grave in Aldeburgh Cemetery, recorded by the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause:-