THE BIRDERS

Together with the documentary team, Edgardo Garcés travelled to his birthplace of La Guajira to record the song of the Vermilion Cardinal. Edgardo tattooed the bird on his arm to ground himself after the death of his parents. He had never seen the bird in the wild before. The story of this eye-catching bird’s connection to the indigenous Wayúu culture is the inspiration for this modern Afro-Colombian electronic song.

Using Colombian cumbia as its base, Mario Galeano and his band Frente Cumbiero, composed a modern take on the classic USA surf songs of the 1960s, but with a birder’s soul. The song draws inspiration from the endemic Santa Marta Parakeets. These social birds live in flocks on a massive ridgeline overlooking the Caribbean Sea and Magdalena River Valley, the birthplace of cumbia music.

English musician Richard Blair is most well known as the founding member of Sidestepper, a pioneering Colombian band that has paved the way for the modern generation of Colombian artists who have successfully gone global through mixing local and foreign musical concepts. Richard’s meditative song was inspired by “mixed migrant flocks," a phenomenon where foreign birds migrate to Colombia’s Caribbean region where they live, travel and sing with local groups of birds.

With his band, El Leopardo, Daniel Broderick (aka Dani Boom) composed a thumping electronic club song that mirrors the Manakin bird’s slow build-up to a frenetic courtship display. The mechanical clapping sound of the White-bearded Manakin’s wings, recorded by the documentary team in Tayrona National Park, is the foundation of Dani’s composition. The courtship call of the Lance-tailed Manakin provides a secondary melody.

Teto Ocampo has spent the past 10 years learning to play the Arhuaco people’s ancestral songs. Through his band Mucho Indio, Teto takes listeners on a cosmic journey through space and time by translating Colombia’s most ancestral melody, the song of the hummingbird, to a modern format. He composed the melody with a rare charu flute, an instrument that only a few of people on the planet still have the knowledge to play.