It sounds absurd, but it’s true! Taylor Swift, Adele and Ed Sheeran have had to queue behind the singing of several birds for weeks. But how did it come to this? On the chart-topping record “Songs of Disappearance”, you won’t hear just any bird song. It is actually the birdsong of birds threatened with extinction.
These are in fact all particularly exotic and rare birds, including a helmet cockatoo, a cave parakeet and a noble parrot. The record opens with a chorus of all the birds’ voices, which is particularly melodic. This was arranged by violinist Simone Slattery. She said she listened to the isolated bird calls until she came up with a structure.
Anthony Albrecht, a doctoral student at Charles Darwin University, and his professor Stephen Garnett came up with the original idea for the record. The latter had previously written a report stating that one in six (216 out of 1,299) Australian bird species is “threatened with extinction due to a lack of political support and ongoing climate change”. The CD is intended to serve as a wake-up call and an appeal to climate change, because the stakes are high. Hence the name, “Songs of Disappearance“.
The album was released on December 3, 2021 by the Bowerbird Collective and BirdLife Australia. It debuted at number five on the Australian ARIA album chart on December 13, 2021 and sold over 2,000 units, including 1,500 pre-order copies. It rose to number three the following week. It has been there for two weeks now, which means it is still being bought and listened to by thousands of people.
A total of 53 different Australian birds can be heard on “Songs of Disappearance”. They were collected by researcher David Stewart over 30 years. The CD is only 25 minutes long, with each song lasting only about thirty seconds. In a way, it’s a reminder of how fleeting these birds’ lives are and how urgent it is to act.
You can listen to the special albumhere.
This article was originally published by Sonja Wickerath in Secret Berlin.