Meet the DJs of nature, inspired by biodiversity

Nature is taking the stage. The sunset starts to fade on a cloudy summer day next to the Main River in an industrial neighborhood of Frankfurt, Germany. The main artist of the festival is an ecologist by day and DJ by night, Dominik Eulberg. Calm snare sounds mixed with a decaying beat like a ball bouncing freely against the floor fill in the atmosphere. Some people in the crowd recognize the pattern and start to cheer, raising their arms up to the sky as if a Mass is just about to begin. A man with sunglasses says to the person next to him: “Dude! It’s finally Dominik.”

A tall man in a black shirt appears behind the music box. Behind his blond hair that looks like golden thin vines falling over his face, he smiles and raises both arms while the crowd cheers. He looks down at the console with lightning lanes and knobs that control the volume, tempo and sound effects. Listening through his headphones, he starts to turn knobs as if trying to unlock a safe; the tempo starts to speed up, ratcheting the intensity of the music until the safe opens up wide, releasing a beat drop. The energy is in the air while people dance and nod as if talking in a language that does not need words to be understood.

Music and nature have had a happy, everlasting marriage. Whether as part of the creativity process or eventually by adding sounds that make up parts of songs, nature has been able to inspire some of the greatest music artists around the globe to make their listeners feel alive. This relationship may not be so evident when it comes to electronic music, but a few artists — Eulberg, Tayta Bird, Robin Perkins, among others — have explored nature for the toolbox to compose melodies that can bring the sounds the natural world has been composing for millions of years as supportive elements of their music.

The rapid development of computers and microprocessor technology since the 1950s has given music artists a new world with endless possibilities of sounds. Pioneers such as the German band Kraftwerk and the Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, known as the “Father of Disco,” started to set the ground rules for computer-controlled rhythms, the use of synthesizers and a robot pop style that would later be known as techno. “I wanted to do an album with the sounds of the ‘50s. The sounds of the ‘60s, of the ‘70s, and then have a sound of the future. … Why don’t I use the synthesizer, which is the sound of the future?” Moroder said in the French duo Daft Punk’s song in his honor, “Giorgio by Moroder.” “ I knew that could be the sound of the future. But I didn’t realize how much the impact would be.”

This opened the door to iconic bands of the genre such as the French duo Daft Punk, Depeche Mode and The Prodigy, which took the music to a new level of innovative and influential sound sculpting. Modern electronic music has been evolving into a radiation of subgenres, reinventing itself with complementary sounds and cutting-edge digital performances, adding more dynamic styles. Artists such as Deadmau5, Armin van Buuren, Aphex Twin and Disclosure have walked away from the cliché label of electronic music as robotic and one-dimensional music that can only be enjoyed in dark nightclubs.

“I grew up without any media, without any music,” Eulberg, DJ, producer and ecologist, told Mongabay. His parents “didn’t want to have those media floods on me, and the sound of nature was the music I was listening to every day.” Since a very young age, Eulberg (meaning “owl mountain” in German) started to record bird songs to analyze how they arrange their patterns to produce melodies. In 1993, he bought his first synthesizer to explore how its sounds, which are not found in nature, are generated. It then felt logical to mix the melody of Mother Nature with the distorted beats of his synthesizer.“For instance, the corncrake [Crex crex] is a perfect snare sound,” Eulberg said. “When I show people the sound, they say it’s a synthesizer or crazy drum machine; they don’t expect that it is an animal.” From starting to play in barbecue hut parties and illegal raves to sold-out festivals, Eulberg has built himself a name as an immersive, optimistic techno musician inspired by biodiversity. After some time, he felt that every bit of wisdom and virtue blooms in its own time, and it cannot last forever. He needed to evolve as an artist. “I don’t want to be limited on ‘this is a guy who is mixing bird songs in his techno music,’” he told Mongabay.

Eulberg has been exploring different platforms and themes, translating them into electronic dance music, EDM. Albums like Avichrom, Flora & Fauna and his upcoming album Lepidoptera (the group of winged insects which includes butterflies and moths) aim to be cheerful music that raises awareness about the beauty of biodiversity and how it is nowadays threatened. “Science is a tool to describe something with … evidence, but the emotion is a power much, more stronger. … It’s a real motor of transformation, and this we can wake up with music,” Eulberg said.

Working on his new album, Eulberg has been observing the life cycle of six butterfly and six moth species closely in enclosures distributed throughout his house: from the moment they hatch from the egg, then how they crawl around feeding and growing, until the point they do the unthinkable building of a chrysalis that reshapes their entire body into totally different types of organisms that can fly and astonish with their shapes and colors. This has helped Eulberg to build a close connection with each of the species and translate their natural behaviors into the emotions that lead the creative process of his music. “I was like 3 or 4 years old, and my father told me I was sitting there for hours with my mouth wide open [watching butterflies] and could not believe those miracles,” Eulberg said. “Nature for me is the greatest artist of all.”

Contrary to a rock metal or reggaeton concert where there is a sort of defined fashion and style that identifies people by music genre, here at the techno festival in Frankfurt, that pattern is not that obvious. Everyone has different outfits, from mainstream jeans and polo shirts to others that do not leave much to imagination; from groups of friends to people who came alone and found someone they connected with; from contemporary adults dancing in their private mental bubbles to teenagers dancing side by side freely with elder people: There is room for everyone. The only word that could describe this crowd is “diversity.”

“Just look around you … the sun could be a beat,” Chris, a Eulberg fan originally from the United States, told Mongabay, “I think electronic music tells you the story of life. … All you need is the music and it just takes you with it; that’s just beautiful.” In such a diverse crowd, everyone has their own interpretation of how nature and electronic music were meant to be together from the start. “Nature also has a rhythm,” Ines, a German with a colorful long robe that steals the show on the dance floor, told Mongabay, “When something is a Kunstwerk [masterpiece], it’s all together in harmony, and it’s similar to nature.”

Rainforest soundscapes

Almost 9,800 kilometers (6,100 miles) away from Frankfurt in the wild rainforest of Tambopata, Peru, DJ Edwin Carrasco, known in the artistic world as Tayta Bird, recorded sounds of the Amazon Rainforest with the help of biologist Jhazel Quispe and producer Richard Bazán. Sounds from animals, plants, local chants, barefoot steps, rain and other soundscapes allowed them to reinterpret nature through music.

The album Nature Punk feels like a rebellious effort to translate the voices of life into melodies that connect people with the Amazon, sharing the idea that humans are part of nature and not above it. “We believe we are rebellious enough in saying that one way to reconnect with nature is by learning or relearning to listen,” Bazán told Mongabay.

To bring an accurate concept of each habitat and species, the team conducted in-depth research on each of the species of interest and the soundscapes where they live, which made it challenging and rewarding to plan the recording of each habitat all over the Madre de Dios River in Tambopata. “The Amazon is very much alive,” Quispe said. “Each microhabitat had a very different soundscape. For example, there is a song about the giant otter [Pteronura brasiliensis], and this obviously represents the aquatic microhabitat, a lagoon.”

Finding the harmony in this process was like having an angry jaguar in a penthouse. Bird looked for inspiration by returning to nature and sitting down, listening to what nature had to tell him. “My grandparents told me that a long time ago, when there was no recorded music or anything like that, what they did was go to the mountains, sit down, listen and observe … and that’s how music was made in the past,” Bird told Mongabay, “I needed to go back to those roots.”

Nature Punk felt almost impossible to put together; it was a complete chaos full of sounds coming from everywhere. “Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want,” Moroder said in Daft Punk’s song in his honor. It’s advice followed by Bird and Bazán during a sunrise when they tried to forget about everything, about recording, and worrying about equipment getting ruined by humidity. They simply closed their eyes and listened to what nature had to say.

“That’s where I remember very clearly that the howler monkey started singing,” Bird told Mongabay. “It was so deep that I compared it to a bass … and this monkey is like one of the first species to start singing at dawn. And based on that, when it starts singing, all the other species appear, the birds, then the mammals, and a whole symphony comes together.”

Bird found in nature a place to keep rising his signature sounds of futuristic folklore, a music genre that blends elements of traditional folklore with electronic music. A range of species such as the giant otter, macaws (Ara spp.), the crested eagle (Morphnus guianensis), the red howler (Alouatta seniculus) and the Peruvian spider monkey (Ateles chamek) portray this tribute to diversity, making it an immersive experience that transports listeners deep into the Amazon Rainforest.

Whether it is in a concrete jungle like Frankfurt or the deep Amazon Rainforest in Tambopata, nature and electronic music can blend and find ways to inspire and reconnect people with their roots. “Music goes beyond its function of entertaining. In other words, if you double-click on the music, a cool world opens up,” Bird said. A world filled with invisible connections that regardless of our differences, shows everyone is welcome. “On the dance floor, everybody is the same. No matter which skin color you have, which sexual orientation you have, which social status you have, religion and so on, everybody is the same on the dance floor,” Eulberg said.

Banner image: DJ Edwin Carrasco, known in the artistic world as Tayta Bird, recording sounds of a rainforest. Image courtesy of Tayta Bird.

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