Cuckoo Song

Cosmo Sheldrake

“If I was walking in the forest and randomly walked into Cosmo performing to nobody in particular, I would not question it at all.”
~ Comment on YouTube

Cosmo Sheldrake is an experimental music maker who collects sounds from the world around him and incorporates them into his music. That could be sounds and songs from birds, sheep, the wind, or even soil and mushrooms. For Cosmo, nature is a cocreator of his musical compositions, and he acknowledges that fact. Other sounds from the human and technological environment also find their way into his pieces.

Cosmo Sheldrake is, you guessed it, the son of Rupert Sheldrake, famous for the paradigm of morphogenetic fields. Both of Rupert’s sons, Merlin and Cosmo, are musicians and nature enthusiasts, Merlin being a mycologist and author of the award-winning book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

Their mother is the no-less-famous vocalist Jill Purce, who was one of the first researchers into cymatics and Tibetan overtone singing and worked with the “father of electronic music,” Karlheinz Stockhausen.

But Cosmo is the one most focused on performing improvised music that seems nonsensical and yet triggers perceptions and insights that bring their own logic. He says that he always has believed that birds and animals “inherit language” in similar ways as humans, and that “they’re highly conscious beings like us.” Indeed.