The Weird, Wonderful World of Cosmo Sheldrake

"A lot of sounds came from this Bulgarian mountain I spent some time on," notes Cosmo Sheldrake before launching into a song from his 2015 EP, Pelicans We. He was on stage at the Waiting Room, an intimate venue beneath a pub in Stoke Newington, explaining his musical inspiration to an adoring crowd. And he wasn't kidding: this wasn't some spiritual 'finding one's self' on a mountain top, he literally recorded sounds like rocks falling, or sheep bleating, and incorporated them into his music. One song even includes the sound of the sun. The SUN. 

Cosmo Sheldrake is what you could call an eccentric. He sets William Blake poems to music, gets a whole room dancing to songs about tardigrades, uses the sound of cracking slate as a pretty sick beat. He covers 'Iko Iko' better than Sia. At his Waiting Room show, he made at least three songs up right on the spot. He's fascinating to watch: he makes odd chirps and noises between songs, like he just can't help but create all the time. You can feel the music moving through him, and it's contagious. Every single person in the jam-packed venue was enthralled by the performance, and most of us knew all the words—even to the nonsense songs. 

Cosmo Sheldrake is brilliant, seamlessly weaving in sounds, styles, and even languages to create music that gets you moving and thinking. If you have the opportunity to see him live, definitely take it; in the meantime, enjoy his oddly earworm-laden EP.