Brian Eno is reworking his collaboration with the late David Bowie, ‘Get Real’, for a new climate change album project. The album, called ‘Sounds Right’, has been created in partnership with the Museum for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and features contributions from artists such as Aurora and London Grammar. The album also includes a profile for Mother Nature as an official artist, featuring tracks produced entirely using sounds from the natural world. ‘Nature’ will also receive royalties as the accredited artist each time the tracks are played.
Eno explained the addition of animal noises to the track: “I wanted big, slightly menacing animals in the song. The Siberian tiger was a bit too overwhelming, so I settled on hyenas and wild pigs.” The album is released in support of Earth Day on 22 April, and is designed to raise money for global conservation projects through the Brian Eno-founded charity EarthPercent. The initiative is vital at a time when almost 70% decline in wildlife populations has occurred in the past 50 years, putting over 1.2m plant and animal species at threat of extinction.
Jarvis Cocker has also collaborated with EarthPercent with his climate-themed “PowerPoint presentation” ‘Biophobia’ which he delivered as a keynote speech at the Green Events and Innovations conference in February. Discussing the project, Cocker explained that he once found nature intimidating due to having grown up in an urban environment, but has since sought to reconnect with it: “We are natural beings, and it’s just that we’ve become divorced from that concept.”
Eno attributed the success of Cocker’s work to its originality: “It’s really a piece of performance art. I think it’s one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen done in this area. It’s a sort of PowerPoint presentation with a difference. The difference being, of course, Jarvis Cocker, who doesn’t do a PowerPoint presentation like anybody else would do it. It’s very powerful, and it’s very moving,” he said.
Overall, Sounds Right and Biophobia both stand as impressive examples of the power of music and the arts to raise awareness and inspire action around the human impact on Earth’s natural systems
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