Cosmo Sheldrake: North America Tour

The astonishing twenty-one tracks on Cosmo Sheldrake's forthcoming album, Eye To The  Ear, range 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.

Cosmo is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, accomplished live improviser, and field recordist from London who started playing the piano at the age of four. Since his first single 'The Moss' (2014), Cosmo has built a large audience of dedicated listeners. A series of successful EPs, ‘Pelicans We’ (2015), ‘Do’ (2021), and ‘Wild Wet World’ (2023) have fuelled viral social media successes. 'Birthday Suit' electrified TikTok in 2020, and reached millions,  many of whom caught Cosmo performing to sell-out crowds in the UK, USA, Japan, and on tour across Europe. 'Come Along' was the soundtrack to a global Apple iPhone commercial in 2019 and has since been streamed more than 200 million times. Cosmo has composed for the Cirque de Soleil (2020), a series of Samuel Beckett plays at the Young Vic (2014), created immersive audio installations at Kings Place (2023) and the Vienna Biennale (2021), made a radio program on making music with birdsong for BBC Radio Three organised community choirs, and co-written and produced with a range of artists including Jake Shears (Scissor  Sisters), Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane, and Mr Jukes. Alongside his numerous solo tours, he has opened shows for The Prodigy, Sylvan Esso, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Johnny Flynn, and Bombay Bicycle Club, among others. Today, Cosmo, 34, is more independent than ever, releasing his new work through his own label, Tardigrade Records,  and his publishing company The Much Much How How.

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), produced by Matthew Herbert. 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 riotous party numbers featuring a six-part horn section in ‘I Stitched My Mind Back To My Body’, to sparse electronic production given texture by a string quartet in ‘I Did and I Don’t and I Do’, to the intoxicating, surrealistic stomp of ‘Run’, to the forest funk of ‘Shiny is the View’, 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 humour 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 travelled 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. This is the case with ‘Wake Up Calls’ and ‘Wild Wet World’, of which 50% of the publishing royalties are distributed to conservation organisations and charities working with the animals and ecosystems featured. Also, a percentage of ‘Bathed  in Sound’ is attributed to “the Earth” via Earth Percent’s the ‘Earth as Your Co-Writer’  royalty scheme – an organisation started by Brian Eno, of which Cosmo is a founding donor– which distributes the funds to a variety of conservation organisations and wildlife trusts. 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 arises out of several questions that emerged in part from the interdisciplinary family conversations that have shaped Cosmo over his life. Cosmo's mother, Jill Purce, is a vocal teacher who worked for seven years with the giant of 20th century German composition, Karlheinz Stockhausen, his father is the biologist Rupert  Sheldrake, and his brother Merlin is a biologist and writer specialising in the subject of fungi and with whom Cosmo shares a company selling live, fermented hot sauce. Some of these questions include what does the more-than-human world say when it is speaking to itself?  How might a river think? Where does one organism stop, and another begin?

Eye To The Ear is the outcome of a remarkable musical enquiry 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.  

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