A unique fusion of recordings of endangered birds with musical elements to create gentle and inspiring songs.

Cosmo Sheldrake is a multi-instrumentalist musician, composer and producer. His album is called ‘Wake Up Calls’, has 13 tracks and a title intended to alert us to the glorious sounds around us, as well as the peril that the natural world faces.

‘Wake Up Calls’ was created over a nine year period, using recordings of bird song featured on the red and amber lists of endangered British birds (with the exception of a Robin and a Blackbird, which aren’t endangered – yet). The album starts at night with a Nightjar and a Nightingale. The music progresses, track by track, through dawn and day time, round to the evening chorus and back to night with another Nightingale and an Owl. 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. ‘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 many of these voices become extinct in Britain, and to remind us not to take any of these creatures and the music that they make for granted’.

Tracklist:

1 Nightjar
2. Nightingale Part 1
3. Dawn Chorus
4. Skylark
5. Cuckoo
6. Marsh Warbler
7. Cuckoo Song
8. Dunnock
9. Bittern
10. Evening Chorus
11. Mistle Thrush
12. Nightingale Part 2
13. Owl Song

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