Stewart Copeland turns animal recordings into Wild Concerto

Stewart Copeland did not treat animal sounds like background noise. He turned them into the score. The Police drummer worked with naturalist Martyn Stewart on Wild Concerto, a 12-movement, 48-minute album built from recordings of wildlife and assembled at Abbey Road Studios in London, with the idea that the raw sounds of nature could drive real composition, not just atmosphere.

The scale is what makes the project feel like a major artistic swing rather than a novelty. CBS reported that Martyn Stewart has built an archive of nearly 100,000 animal recordings over decades, while Copeland shaped the music in his Los Angeles studio using about 30,000 hours of those sounds. He matched instruments by ear, even pairing wolves with trombone, then built around the animal voices with custom percussion and rare instruments. The credits for the release name Stewart Copeland, Kingdom Orchestra, Troy Miller, and The Listening Planet.

Wild Concerto was released on April 18, 2025, on Platoon. Track titles like White Throated Sparrow (Is Happy On the Glacier), Barred Owl and the Frog Brigade, Screaming Piha (Trolls the Titi Monkeys of the Andes Basin), Hyena Party On the Skeleton Coast, and Coltrane Wolves in the Arctic Circle make the concept plain: this is a concerto that treats the animal kingdom like the lead section.

What gives the project weight, though, is its conservation angle. CBS reported that Martyn Stewart has carried some especially rare material, including the last known recording of the Panamanian golden frog, a species listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1976 and now critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He also has recordings of the northern white rhinoceros, which is extinct in the wild. Copeland and Stewart framed the album as a response to biodiversity loss, with the goal of helping listeners fall in love with the beauty of animals enough to want to protect them.

For drummers, that is the real hook. Wild Concerto is not just field recordings stitched into a prestige package. It is a lesson in orchestration, pulse, and how to make nonhuman sound feel like groove. Copeland has spent a career making drums speak with personality, and here he extends that instinct into an entire ecosystem, turning birds, wolves, frogs, and seals into the rhythmic engine of the piece.