Cosmo Sheldrake

Cosmo Sheldrake is singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist from London. He collects and plays a variety of instruments, from the bass clarinet to the banjo. The music he makes with them, inspired by and often incorporating field recordings and natural soundscapes, is essential listening for anyone interested in hearing truly unique new sounds. Sheldrake grew up surrounded by both music and a deep understanding and fascination with the natural world. His father, Rupert Sheldrake, is a biologist who comes from a long line of church organists. His mother, Jill Purce, whose own mother was a concert pianist, inspired a revival of group chant, teaches Mongolian overtone chanting and spent four years working with the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Sheldrake began playing classical piano at the age of four, learning by ear using the Suzuki method which essentially teaches music as if it were a language to become fluent in. By the time he was seven he had moved on to playing New Orleans-style blues and boogie-woogie. At 15, he was studying minimalism and using Logic to program drums and beats. He composed music for a series of Samuel Beckett plays at the Young Vic and for Relax & Dream, a project which brought bringing soothing music and nature videos to children in hospital and hospices. Until 2013 he ran a community choir in Brighton, and he has worked as a facilitator, running music workshops in Europe and North America. Throughout his career, Sheldrake has continued to be fascinated by sound collection and field-recordings. In 2013, he gave a Tedx talk entitled ‘Interspecies Collaboration’ during which he created a symphony of sounds featuring the sun and British birds in collaboration with his own vocal improvisation. In 2017, he composed the soundtrack for ‘Moving Art’, a Netflix nature series in which filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg explores the beauty of oceans, forests, deserts and flowers.