Cosmo Sheldrake - new album "Wild Wet World"
The pioneering multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer releases a collection of music
April 26, 2023
Listen on streaming platforms here: lnk.to/wildwetworld
We will hear humpback whales singing, sperm whales clicking, weddell seals courting, coral reefs spluttering, bucktoothed parrot fish crunching, an oyster toad fish grunting, shrimp snapping, long horned sculpins honking, blue whales lamenting and haddock drumming. The music is composed entirely out of recordings of these animals and the sound worlds that they inhabit.
The haunting lead track “Bathed in Sound” will be released on the 31st of March as part of Brian Eno’s Earth Percent Charity campaign. “Bathed in Sound” will be released in a test case with the charity and a percentage of the publishing royalties will be donated to "The Earth”, which will in turn be distributed to a number of organisations working to tackle climate change and help restore and protect the living world.
The seven tracks featured on “Wild Wet World” are extraordinary compositions that seek to immerse the listener in the sophisticated soundscapes of the ocean. Many marine creatures rely on sound to communicate. Exciting new discoveries by the marine biologist Steve Simpson suggest that playing the sound of healthy coral reefs to dying reefs can help tempt back keystone species and restore health to these complex ecosystems (a technique called 'acoustic enrichment’). Over the course of the EP, we hear the sound of a coral reef slowly coming back to life, using some of Simpson’s recordings. The EP also features recordings of the last community of orcas on the west coast of Scotland. This group use a unique dialect to communicate with one another, but are destined for extinction owing to chemical contaminants in the waters that they inhabit which prevent them from reproducing. Their language will die with them.
Many of these organisms and the ecosystems they inhabit are critically threatened by overfishing, deep sea mining, acidification, and warming. The worsening health of the oceans has led the UN to declare this the ‘Decade of the Ocean. As Tom Mustill’s book “How to Speak Whale”, and Hal Whitehead’s “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins" demonstrate, many of the features we consider to be uniquely human signs of intelligence and cultural practices are also shared by a wide range of other creatures. Many argue that they should be extended some forms of legal protections and rights similar to those attributed to humans or corporations (‘More than Human Rights Frameworks’). For these reasons, Cosmo is assigning 50% of the publishing royalties (the intellectual property side/songwriting aspect of the royalty splits) to organisations that support the creatures and ecosystems whose voices feature on the record.
Below is a list of some of the charities and organisations that Wild Wet World will support:
• Oceana
• The Marine Conservation Society
• Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust
• Whale and Dolphin Conservation Organisation
• World Cetacean Alliance
• Sussex dolphin project
• Coral Reef Alliance
We represent these songs in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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