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Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs releases ambient EP using lockdown birdsong

By | Published on Wednesday 27 May 2020

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs has returned with a new EP. In something of a departure from his usual sound, it’s an ambient record made using field recordings of birdsong recorded around the world during the COVID-19 lockdown. Though people have been sending the birdsong recordings over to him, he didn’t break lockdown to record them himself.

Commenting on the release, appropriately called ‘I Can Hear The Birds’, the producer – real name Orlando Higginbottom – says: “On 22 Mar a friend sent me a recording of the birds that were keeping her awake in the Canary Islands. It was early in this story and anxiety was high, so I took the recording and made some music to it as a present to send back, a hug, and an exercise to take my mind off the obvious”.

“The next day I spoke to a friend in South London who, like many of us, was commenting on the volume of the birdsong in his garden, so I asked for a recording of that too, and he woke at dawn the next day and sent me blackbirds, house sparrows, and a great tit”, he goes on.

“I sent him music a day or two later. Working on my existing musical projects was proving difficult and so this pattern of receiving bird recordings from friends and sending them back songs emerged as a welcome practice”.

“On 15 Apr my friend Jon Wright of Sports Banger, aware of my project, showed me a drawing a kid had done on the letter Boris Johnson had sent out to every UK household”, he continues. “On it were colourful birds and ‘bum face boris bollocks’. Also the words ‘I can hear the birds again’. So I took that as a sign that I should finish this music and release it as an EP called ‘I Can Hear The Birds'”.

“I did eight tracks in total, [including] from Delhi, Nairobi, New York, [but] there are four on this EP, because four feels like the right amount”.

‘I Can Hear The Birds’ – although it will always be called ‘Bum Face Boris Bollocks’ to me – is available to stream and download here.



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