Created by legendary Australian experimental musician and composer Jon Rose, Night Songs is a remarkable sonic experience: an interspecies engagement between the 13-million-year-old music of a uniquely Australian songbird—the Pied Butcherbird—and contemporary human musicians. 

Drawing from musicologist Dr. Hollis Taylor’s extensive field recordings of Pied Butcherbird songs, Night Songs is a compression of geography and time. Taylor’s archive of the birds’ songs come from Centralia, Western Australia and Far North Queensland. Pied Butcherbirds (Cracticus Nigrogularis) sing their longform songs at night in spring, and this performance shrinks a twelve hour period from early evening, overnight (the time of maximum singing), to the next morning (a multi-species chorus) into a one-hour concentrated audio-visual performance. Jon Rose has arranged this music for eight human musicians and is performed by Sydney’s premiere new music group Ensemble Offspring.

A glimpse of Night Songs can be found here.