Cosmo Sheldrake Announces New LP 'Eye To The Ear' & Shares Two New Singles

London-born Cosmo Sheldrake announces his long-awaited second studio album Eye to the Ear will be released April 12 via Tardigrade Records. The multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, accomplished live improviser, and field recordist also shares two singles from the album to celebrate the announcement: “Stop the Music” and “Does the Swallow Dream of Flying”.

Eye to the Ear was produced by Cosmo and mixed by Dilip Harris (King Krule, Micachu, Mount Kimbie) and features twenty-one tracks combining traditional instrumentation, electronic production, and field recordings ranging from celebratory anthems to soulful elegies to irresistible dance numbers.

Animated by themes of interconnection and symbiosis, Cosmo's expansive musical imagination is rooted in practices of listening – both to human and more-than-human sound worlds. Eye to the Ear, Cosmo's most accomplished creation to date – as producer, composer, performer and songwriter – makes it clear that the living world is a noisy and musical place with the power to change the way we think, feel, and imagine.

“I am incredibly excited to share some of the music from my new album Eye to the Ear,” Cosmo says, “It has been a wild journey to piece it all together over the last five years. Today I'm releasing the opening and final songs of the album together. The first is ‘Stop the Music', which I wrote after learning about the extraordinary adventures of an ancestor of mine who had been a pickle and condiment maker.

The song slowly fermented, and is now a celebratory stomp exploring themes of consumption, excess, madness, and the possibility of transformation. The final song on the album is called ‘Does the Swallow Dream of Flying' which I wrote in a solar powered studio in a shed in Dorset. Here, I try to imagine the world from the perspective of other beings, including a bird, a flower, a river, and the wind. It also features the wonderful vocal ensemble Howl. I am so grateful to all the people, places, creatures, plants, fungi, and sounds that have helped to bring this music into being. I hope you enjoy!”

Eye to the Ear is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cosmo's first full-length album, The Much Much How How and I (2018). A work of remarkable range and maturity, Eye to the Ear sees Cosmo move from soulful ballads arranged for a nine-piece female and non-binary choir (HOWL) to haunting polyphonic songs that have grown out of field recordings of curlews, whales, fish, and frogs, in a continuation of Cosmo's dialogues with the rhythms and tones of the living world that he explored on Wake Up Calls (2020) and Wild Wet World (2023). Together, these twenty-one tracks create a journey that feels both vast and intimate as it ranges deftly between folk forms, jazz, electronic and experimental pop. Cosmo's musical humor is a welcome and ever-present companion. 

Cosmo's commitment to engaging musically with the living world is well established. He has worked with the ecologist Steve Simpson and his lab at Bristol University, with Simon McBurney and Crystal Pite and the legendary sound recordist and acoustic ecologist Bernie Krause, some of whose recordings also feature on Eye to the Ear.

Cosmo's own field recording is informed by a degree in anthropology and a practice of deep listening. In recent years, he has traveled on expeditions as a field recordist with his brother, the biologist Merlin Sheldrake, and other leading researchers and scholars including Robert Macfarlane, Giuliana Furci, (of the Fungi Foundation), and Toby Kiers (of SPUN).

The album incorporates elements of these journeys, including subterranean recordings on the track “Lichens” made at the site of Furci's collection of a new species of magic mushroom in the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, protected under a Rights of Nature constitutional ruling.

In addition, Cosmo is a core member of the More Than Human Rights Project, a group made up of philosophers, lawyers, judges, artists, indigenous leaders, and scientists working across disciplines to deepen and expand legal frameworks to find new ways to protect the living world.

Based on his exploration of the sounds of the more-than-human world, Cosmo has pioneered an approach to sharing the publishing royalties of his new releases, attempting to directly return funds to the animals and places that have inspired – and, on a number of tracks, co-authored – the music (see recent article in The Guardian). This is the case with Wake Up Calls and Wild Wet World, of which 50% of the publishing royalties are distributed to conservation organizations and charities working with the animals and ecosystems featured.

A percentage of the royalties generated by Eye to the Ear will also be donated to ‘the Earth' through Earth Percent. In addition, specific tracks on Eye to the Ear that feature the sounds of more-than-human organisms have specific royalty arrangements. For example, Cosmo has assigned 30% of the publishing rights of the track “But Once a Child” to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' (RSPB) curlew recovery program, which works to conserve populations of these endangered birds. Similarly, he has assigned 10% of the publishing rights of the track “Lichens” to the Fungi Foundation.

Eye to the Ear is the outcome of a remarkable musical inquiry guided by an impish and irresistible logic. Cosmo Sheldrake and his human and more-than-human collaborators have composed – and decomposed – a wild piece of art that sings to the urgency and possibility of our times.

Photo Credit: Jack Thompson-Roylance

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