DAWN OF THE CYCADS

This fabulous compilation was my first contact with the Birdsongs, and still remains my favourite. It's not only that each individual track contributes with its own value to the final score: besides, they were selected and sequenced conforming a fine album, and offering a superb listening experience, because the sound quality of the magnetic tape recordings included here was decisively improved, in order to match the rest of it.

The musical content is an instrumental venture into the evocation of sounds and voices of mesozoic life forms (whatever they might have sounded like, that's why tou need to be conducted by the musicians fantasy). You will find here classics from their almost unknown repertoire, including the emblematic "Ptoccata", as well as a tip to their early academic influences with "(Excerpts from) The Rite of Spring" of Igor Stravinsky.

I find the live batch less appealing, but, by the moment you get there, probably it won't matter to you.