Checked your email first thing in the morning and already got 100+ unread messages blowing up your inbox? Yup, must be Bandcamp Friday again!

I’ve been out of action for a short while — lotta work crap taking up way too much of my time, mostly — but I’m still here, still sharing the good word about new musical discoveries. Which unfortunately is more than can be said about a large number of other folks these days: have you heard about this bullshit?

Imagine I went to the trouble to seek out the Ron Burgundy meme and added the text “Capitalism was a bad idea!” and inserted the image here.

Megafauna – Birdsong (self-released, 06 July 2026)

Highly attentive regular readers may recall that outside of the world of music, my biggest passion is birds — watching, listening to, attempting to identify, and just generally appreciating. So when Canadian experimental-noise artist Megafauna (brought to you by the same person who runs on-again-off-again record label Syrup Moose) dropped a new piece titled “Birdsong” about a month ago, of course it piqued my interests.

The backstory here is that Megafauna had been requested to perform something “more ethereal” than their standard fare at a festival earlier this year, and the result was this forty-two minute and forty-two second composition. The track begins with a literal representation of its title that also perfectly fits its purview: amidst falling raindrops, we hear the sounds of several species of avian, consisting of varied ethereal whistles and yelps.

Gradually these natural-sounding recordings give way to more peculiar sounds, resembling bursts of static or bits of analog synth or even warped drum machine noises. But in this presentation, absolutely everything you hear (excluding the rain) is a noise produced by our modern-day dinosaurs. Some of these sounds are processed and altered, chopped up and mixed up — but some are barely touched. After all, Sage-Grouse (to name one well-known example) or Bitterns (who do make an appearance somewhere in the mix here) are famous for their bizarre vocalizations, while the Lyrebird (also included in this piece) is perhaps the animal kingdom’s most astounding mimic with an unbelievably wide repertoire.

The sparse arrangement tends to put the listener at ease, to where eventually you may no longer be focusing on individual noises or specific parts, but just spacing out and soaking in the sound as a whole. Each time through, I found the ambiance easy to get lost in, to the point where the 40+ minutes pass more quickly than might have been expected. Occasionally a familiar sound will grab my attention: here and there the CAW of an American Crow, for example, but then it just as quickly fades back into the din — much like the real-life experience of wandering through a forest and picking up random bits of sound.

In the end, it fades back into the same whistling and raining where it all started. Coincidentally, on my most recent re-listen (as I write these words this afternoon), an actual rainstorm had picked up outside my window, so as the “Birdsong” outro grew quieter, it seamlessly merged with the peaceful patter of rain and a few faroff rolls of thunder from outside.

Find the digital album on Bandcamp or Ampwall.
 

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Megafauna: Bandcamp | Ampwall | The Marsh