Cosmo Sheldrake • Live Performance

Cosmo is a UK-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, live improviser, and field recordist. Running through all his work is a belief that the living world is a noisy and musical place with the power to change how we think, feel, and imagine. Together with his human and non-human collaborators, Cosmo creates music that speaks to the urgency and possibility of our times.

A series of releases — The Moss (2014), Pelicans We (2015), Wake Up Calls (2020), Do (2021), Wild Wet World (2023), The Much Much How How and I (2018, co-produced with Matthew Herbert), and Eye to the Ear (2024) — have fuelled viral social media hits. Birthday Suit electrified TikTok in 2020, reaching millions, many of whom caught Cosmo performing to sold-out crowds in the UK, USA, Japan, and 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 Cirque du Soleil (2020), a series of Samuel Beckett plays at the Young Vic (2014), organised community choirs, and co-written and produced with a wide range of artists including Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane, Mr Jukes, and the Gentle Mystics. He is also in a band called Don’t with his wife Flora Wallace. Alongside his numerous solo tours, he has opened shows for The Prodigy, Sylvan Esso, Johnny Flynn, Mystery Jets, and Bombay Bicycle Club, among others.

Cosmo’s musical imagination is rooted in practices of deep listening — both to human and non-human sound worlds. In recent years, he has presented a radio show on BBC Radio 3 about birdsong and 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 (see the New York Times for a write-up of one of these field trips).

Cosmo is a core member of the More Than Human Rights Project (MOTH), a group of philosophers, lawyers, judges, artists, Indigenous leaders, environmental activists and scientists working across disciplines to expand legal frameworks to protect the living world (see this Guardian article for more). In October 2024, together with Robert Macfarlane, Giuliana Furci and César Rodríguez-Garavito, Cosmo released Song of the Cedars, composed in the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador. In collaboration with the MOTH collective, he filed a legal petition in Ecuador to recognise the moral authorship of the Los Cedros Cloud Forest as a co-creator of the song. If successful, this will mark the first time an ecosystem’s authorship is recognised in the creation of an artwork.

Cosmo recently collaborated with Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and Giuliana Furci on a sound piece, Honguito Niño, for Cecilia’s show at the Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels. He is the founder of Tardigrade Records and its imprint Moth Records and, together with his brother Merlin, runs a business selling live, fermented hot sauce.