Birds have fascinated poets for centuries, not just for their song and flight but as symbols: of hope, freedom, love, communication, peace, luck good and bad, and migration.  And what better way to honour them than by sending songs out into the air?

Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds brings six musicians from broad-ranging backgrounds together to perform bird inspired poems, written by John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Judith Wright, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gwen Harwood, A D Hope and others. It features the piano trio Seraphim with Anna Goldsworthy on piano, Helen Ayres on violin and Tim Nankervis on cello, along with composer James Ledger and singer-songwriters Paul Kelly and Alice Keath.

They have created an evocative sound-scape, each poem its own world - delicate and intimate at times, colossal and grinding at others, with all states in between. Banjo with pizzicato strings, synthesizer drones with piano, processed guitar with glockenspiel are just a few of the combinations to be heard.

Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds is a unique marriage of electronics, acoustic instruments and the human voice, celebrating winged creatures from the barn owl to the nightingale, from the thornbill to the falcon, from the magpie to the swan.

The Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds album is now available.

“Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric” Cameron Woodhead, The Age 

“He [Kelly] sung with his arms outstretched like a bird in flight and the music, words and voices combined effortlessly” Brigid Delaney, The Guardian

Opening for Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds is Narrm-based Wergaia / Wemba Wemba woman Alice Skye.

On stage, Alice has supported the likes of Benny Walker, Archie Roach, Colin Hay, Thelma Plum, Clare Bowditch and Stella Donnelly, charmed national crowds at the Falls Festival, performed at the 2018 NIMA Awards as the triple j Unearthed competition winner, and toured her debut album with childhood friends and close band mates Sam and Kane King.

Alice recently released her single ‘I Feel Better But I Don’t Feel Good’. Premiering on triple j’s Home & Hosed, the single follows a big year for the indie singer/songwriter, who appeared on ABC’s ‘Deadly Heart’ compilation album with the single “Speak Your Language”, performed at the Darebin Music Feast and took home the Emerging Artist Award at the 2019 Australian Women in Music Awards.