CucuSonic
The Vinyl Factory is releasing Cucusonic – an international music and bio-science collaboration, drawing attention to the local and global importance of the biodiversity of Colombia – on the 29th of October.
Cucusonic is an album created by a collaborative collective of Colombian bio-scientists, anthropologists, and musicians – partnered with University of Manchester’s ‘Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology’ and In Place of War. The team set up a network with diverse local communities to collect and record sounds and stories from the Colombian Neotropical forests, inviting high profile artists and producers to create tracks from the field recordings.
The aim of the project, and the resulting album, is to raise awareness about the biodiversity of Colombia, and its importance globally – by translating natural soundscape recordings and bioacoustic data into new music. Cucosonic features artists, including Bræv, Brian Eno, Coldcut, Fer Isella, Fingathing, Iggor Cavalera, Kate Simko, Laima Leyton, Martyn Ware, Matthew Dear, Mexican Institute of Sound, and Osunlade.
The concept behind the project, and the album, is that the sounds of vital habitats and their species – such as, in this case, birds, bats, and frogs – can be heard, and creatively interpreted, in different ways. On Cucusonic, these sounds have been used as a measure of biodiversity, revealing the health of an environment, as a feature of the cultural imagination of local communities, and as a creative resource, inspiring artists to compose and produce. Due to restrictions from the Coronavirus pandemic, the project was adapted to be produced remotely. Field recordings were made using state-of-the-art sensors such as bioacoustic monitors as well as simple devices like mobile phones, which were then shared with the artists.
The result is a carbon-friendly production, and the album itself will be made of 100% recyclable materials, released the same week as the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference on 1st November 2021 – 12th November 2021.
