Flying Rivers, Slipknot Swifts & Musical Frogs: Take This Podcast For A Walk In Nature

0:03I've been here today dressed as a giant red squirrel. For me, going to COP was all about the fact that for anybody who doesn't know that Bangladesh is also incredibly climate vulnerable and is facing the same situation. And I just wanted people to know that there are human implications. The facts and the stories of climate change feel so overwhelming that it's really hard to think we can do something about it.

0:40Welcome to a special edition of the Drowning Sound podcast. I say special, they're all special, obviously. But in this episode, I'd like you to grab your boots, a scarf, a jacket, or unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere, obviously you don't need all those things, and your headphones, and take this podcast out for a walk. Because this is a podcast all about nature and music. and I feel like if you're wandering around in a nice wood or on a beach or somewhere with some greenery then you might find that this conversation will have a tiny bit more meaning but also I planned to put this podcast out on New Year's Day and you might not be hearing it on New Year's Day but I know that a new year walk is a thing and a new year can begin whenever you're listening to this.

1:29So without further ado let me make some sense of the clips you just heard because they're from a series of conversations I had backstage at Earthsonic Live, which was this incredible event bringing together nature, music, and climate change activists, or climate justice activists. And that was one of the topics I actually discussed in a much longer interview, which you may have heard a few weeks ago with Tori Choi, who is the climate advisor who works with Brian Eno and Billy Eilish. We talked a little bit about, should we even be using terms like climate and I think this event did such an amazing job at bringing together the complexity and the joy of nature and how we as human beings live on this big infinite planet made of all these incredible rocks and plants and nutrients but above all full of people like us and full of animals that we're in awe of and the event took place in the Natural History Museum in Manchester it's called the Manchester Museum and I loved wandering around the first thing I saw when I got there just as the event was starting was people with headphones on and little mics going into the room with the frogs that if you've ever been to the Manchester Museum you'll know they've got these cool tiny little frogs and people were recording them to create sounds for their samplers and all these people were getting a lesson from Hanako Amori who's an amazing musician honestly go listen to some of her tracks you might recognize her as one part of K Tempest's live performance Hanako's also been in Ed O 'Brien from Radio Heads Band and done various things she's an incredibly talented musician and um yeah she was giving people their like first lesson in how to use Ableton and a sampler and making music and in the room next where we were recording I saw some people with the biggest grins on their faces as they got to learn how to make sounds with these frog sounds and um interestingly as you might have heard on one of the episodes of the podcast from Tala Music week some of the sounds of nature do sound weirdly like the sounds of synthesizers and different instruments so i'd imagine the sounds that they'd recorded and how they were contorting them was just bringing so much joy and um it was pretty clear to see that it was probably very beneficial to the mental health of everyone in the room to just have this experience of playing with sound but also having that closeness with nature and being able to manipulate it in a way which I'm assuming I've never done and I know a lot of people haven't done.

4:17If you're interested in hearing what a lot of the sounds sound like, the organisers of the event, they're an organisation called Earthsonic, run by the people that are behind in place of war. It's their kind of climate side of things. Earthsonic was also responsible for an incredible bicep film, bicep soundtrack film called To Cook, which is really a film about the encroachment of colonialism and the kind of capitalist progress and climate change kind of as a pincer movement of people in the arctic such a powerful film about identity and local kind of like patriotism and pride in where you're from and just seeing how temperatures and weather systems are changing was impacting people's ability to cross lakes in winter and get food in the ways they once did and at the same time because of that people are moving into the towns and cities who previously used to preserve a lot of the kind of natural world so it's an incredible film lots of big changes discussed in it um so yeah as i said this is a bit of a different episode there's three interviews and um a short clip from my conversation with Tori which I just felt was really relevant to this discussion.

5:38I think that we should begin with a conversation I had with these two amazing ladies that were running the RSPB, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds stand which was upstairs in the museum and there was a series of different workshops and all sorts of things they were running. I just thought I'd have a really quick chat with them to find out what they were there, what they were doing and what we can learn from them. What I did not expect was what they had to say about swifts. So let's join my quick conversation. I'm going to let them introduce themselves first. I'm Annabelle Rushton and I work for the RSPB up on a nature reserve in the Lake District.

6:20Actually, I've come down from the lakes today, a place called Wild Horsewater. But I've been here today dressed as a giant red squirrel with an enormous giant red squirrel head that has frightened a few small children today. I've been talking about a lot of the volunteering opportunities that the RSPB have, particularly in the Northwest, but also nationally across the UK, and talking about the fact that the reason I'm dressed as a giant red squirrel is the site that I work on is one of the largest remaining areas of temperate rainforest left in the country, home to real-life red squirrels, not with quite such giant heads as mine.

6:55And that's often quite a really interesting conversation starter because so many people are not familiar with the fact that we even have rainforest in the UK. So I've chatted a lot about that today. I'm Roshni Palmer Hill and I'm also part of the RSPB and I'm the Community Engagement Officer for Greater Manchester. So really happy to be at the Manchester Museum for the Earthsonic Live. And I'm part of a SWIFT project. So SWIFTs are a summer migratory bird that come to the UK every year but are endangered. So we're trying to raise awareness about it and also give people the opportunity to get involved with some volunteering.

7:32And I've also been upstairs in the museum with some local artists who are from Sheffield doing some shadow puppetry with kids as well, which has been amazing, the kind of imagination that's run wild today. How do you think events like this that bring culture, music and what you do with nature together, how important do you think they are for engaging people? Like, unbelievably so. So one of the talks I managed to sneak into this afternoon was discussing that exact topic. It was called Echoes of the Rainforest Fell. And it was discussing exactly that about how culture and people and nature and the environment are so intrinsically linked.

8:14and often people have lost that connection or they haven't, but they don't notice that they have that connection. And so a big part of what we do is about trying to foster that connection between people and their environment. And so events like this that bring all of the elements and the ways in which people might connect through music or through literature, the arts, or practically getting out there and digging a tree into the ground or whatever, are just really, really important, I think, because people kind of learn and are inspired by different elements of it. Yeah, just to add to that, I think there are lots of different ways in which people connect and learn.

8:50And so by having the visual and the auditory and all the different elements, all the senses engaged, it creates many different pathways for people to be inspired. And I think that's when our flaw came in as, okay, you're inspired, you want to do something to make a difference because you've heard this amazing song, or you've done this incredible workshop or made a really cool puppet what can you do now and that's how we came in to say well you can do this this and this in manchester we've got youth groups that people can get involved with and to help inspire the next generation and we've also got our swift volunteers so that might be going out in the summer on your summer walk and doing some surveying it might be trying to get swift bricks in planning permission it might be more campaigns orientated things that's signing petitions or maybe going out on marches there's so many different things that people can do and if that's you love being at home and sitting behind your computer and doing quiet volunteering or getting out there on the streets um or coming to an event like this then there's something for you can i ask one question that might sound odd but the p is for protection do you think people are more inclined to protect birds in the natural world do you think there's something like when people engage in it you feel like they're like oh there's something I can do definitely and I think although the RSPB is the UK's largest nature conservation charity so we're not just about birds we're about all nature and the habitats and the environment in which they live I think birds in particular are kind of our poster child because they have got such a strong connection with people in that you know we have some fantastic mammals in this country that virtually no one can ever see other than perhaps an urban fox I run a badger watching hide up at wild horse water and it's so popular because that is an animal that although it's widespread across the country most people have never seen whereas birds are kind of an ever-present thing in our lives no matter whether you live in a very urban environment a rural environment you know I've been chatting to a lot of people today lots of young people and I always say what's your favorite what's your favorite animal what wildlife do you like to see and nearly always the little kids have come back with we get a robin in our garden or I see the pigeons in the city or whatever it is birds are this fantastic way that people can connect because they're kind of in all spaces really cheesy last question what's a swift's best song oh gosh i feel like i i wish i knew more taylor swift songs i could say a swifty song but i'm not oh god i don't know that many taylor swift songs um or something that involves a lot of screaming yeah because you have this incredible high-pitched note what do you think so the swift is known as the screaming devil bird because their song doesn't really sound an awful lot like a song think like front man of slipknot kind of song which isn't quite so melodic as actual taylor swift gives them a real soundtrack to the summer that i grew up with that unfortunately something that we're losing from our skies and why projects like swift cities are so important

12:09thank you to annabelle and roshni for uh dropping in and having that quick chat with me one thing they said as they were leaving was that you can actually get a swifts t-shirt with the tour dates on the back. The tour dates being the migration patterns and when you can see them. So if you want to look up that t-shirt on the RSPB website, they've got some other great merch. There's some Bird Nerd merch on there too, which I thought was quite fun. And all sorts of, like if you're ever looking for a gift for someone, going to an organisation like that and supporting them is such a better way of doing two things at once in that you're supporting an organisation and getting yourself something quite cool and quite fun.

12:45Like a lot of the Greenpeace merch which is pretty badass as well. Like they did the succession meme of I'm suing Greenpeace as a t-shirt. Yeah, I've noticed there's definitely a higher quality of merch skills going into a lot of those companies. I wonder if they're people that worked in music previously, which brings me on to the next part of my conversation. This was just like a brief bit. I just wanted to put into context like why music and the climate movement is so important. And I think that one of my missions at the start of 2025 was to try and work out how my desire to be part of the climate movement and how the gap that I could see between all these amazing organizations even within music doing things and wider audiences felt like something that the Drowning Sound podcast should be a part of bridging some of those gaps because I think as music fans and as people who live on planet earth i think many of us care about trying to ensure that life can be preserved on this planet and i think that listening to musicians over the years listening to bjork and anoni but similarly just like listening to a lot of much smaller artists like i've had conversations with people just asking how can i do music and not feel like i'm a burden to the planet or creating loads of emissions and I remember sitting around in the Drowning Sun office once and just being surrounded by promo CDs and just thinking this is just so much plastic and this is just one office and that there's 30 other publications in London and a load more radio people all getting sent all the same stuff and how none of us have the time to listen to it all because we were literally getting like two or three post sacks a day at one point when CD burners were a big deal all those hopes and dreams sitting in those bags and um yeah challenging emotionally but also just seeing how much plastic when you walk into a record shop you don't really think about it as these are little bits of oil that have been turned into plastic and a lot of this is not going to be recycled and a lot of it's going to sit on shelves and now obviously a couple of decades on a lot of those cds are just sitting in boxes in people's cupboards or sitting in charity shops or more likely landfill so i think that musicians have always wanted to work out things about sustainability but i think as fans we listen to our favorite musicians because they are somewhere emotionally within us that's in a different place to an actor playing someone else or to a kind of scientist who we might listen to but might not have the same emotional connection to already and i think that One of the other conversations we had on the podcast this year was chatting to Raoul Reynolds from Mental Shikari when we were at Reading.

15:40And they did a really powerful speech on stage about the kind of tipping point morale with the state of the planet. And it might feel heavy and doomed, but that isn't a lot of the music we listen to. So anyway, I just wanted to just share this little bit from my conversation with Tori Choi. She is an incredible, inspirational speaker. And in the full interview, we talked about her taking massive attack to meet Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to sign the Fossil Free Non-Proliferation Treaty. I got all the right words out in the right order. And we also talked about how she does kind of work with and advising people like Billie Eilish and Brian Eno and his Earth Percent organisation.

16:25and Billie's overheated kind of events and conferences that she puts on. And yeah, I just wanted to just share this little bit because I think that in amongst a lot of complicated and heavy conversations, just reminding ourselves like how important music is and how central it is just felt right. And I'm experimenting with this different format of podcast with some short and long interviews. um but anyway here is tori choy

17:01how important a role does music play for you oh my gosh i i mean it's like asking me how important oxygen is to my livelihood music is so important i feel like not only from a point of escapism but just joy and bringing people together everyone knows that feeling of like being in a room full of people who are all there to see this one artist and there's that one song that everyone knows and they feel so connected and so moved and for me that translates even further when I think about artists who are taking a stand for the world that I want to live in I remember when um Billie came to the UK I think it was two summers ago now and she did like this really small surprise set at the electric ballroom in camden and she was like oh my god i haven't done a small show in years because it's been 10 years since ocean ice came out and that's kind of what propelled her to stardom at 13 and also because of lockdown she sort of bypassed playing a lot of those smaller shows she got so big so yeah exactly and she was doing this really small show and all of the fans in the audience were just mesmerized you know and just so entranced by her every word and everything that she was saying and I was like that's what it's about like that's how you use your fandom responsibly because there are so many people who would literally do anything for the artists that they love and I'm like how great is it that we have an artist who really stands on the right side of history and really tries to use their platform in and outside of their music so I remember that feeling and I remember thinking oh yeah this is the sector I want to work in because just look how compelled and moved these people are and I felt that as a fan of Billy's and also a consumer of music like also being neurodivergent so much of the way that music moves through me is deeply deeply emotional and powerful and it can literally be the difference between me having a bad day and having a great day or me feeling like kind of a bit numb and then feel so emotional and compelled and compassionate about um yeah the piece that I'm listening to so yeah music is a huge part of my life it always has been and that's a really funny thing is I remember when I was younger and I grew up in Hong Kong I kind of started doing like freelance work for this one production company that would bring indie acts to um east and southeast Asia and I remember thinking at that point I want to work in music and then that kind of fell to the sidelines and I was like well I'm working climate now I don't know if that's ever a thing that can combine and lo and behold here I am I'm like oh this feels like coming back home to myself in a weird way

19:45so I'll just cut that there that was me and uh Tori backstage in Manchester Museum back in November 2025 having a conversation and um I met Tori for the first time back in I think it was in the spring we were at an event which in place of war actually organized talking through lots of different things and i had followed tori online for a while and actually been reading her book which i recommend um it's called it's not just you how to navigate eco-anxiety and the climate crisis and uh if you don't just take my word for it being a good read the top of the book has a quote that says the world is in desperate need of this book and uh that is from greta Thunberg and on the back, a galvanizing breath of fresh air from Michaela Loach.

20:31I found the book really accessible and really thoughtful, but also just to bring together, as Tori mentioned there, like her neurodivergence and the ways in which certain people are drawn much more to the injustice of what's happening to the planet but also really like the climate justice movement is about some of the biggest corporations and some of the richest people in the world deciding to focus on fossil fuel and other polluting emissions other things which are rapidly speeding up the change to our planet and i think that even the most agro right-wing anti-climate science person will admit that there is change happening.

21:23I think it's just about the speed and the cause is often what they are in denial about. And I think that the neurodivergent bit, I think, is the thing that I've come to terms with, will come to understand over the last few years since I was diagnosed as being both ADHD and autistic, which is known as ADHD. And those two things allow me to see the patterns um but also to probably feel able to understand climate as a concept that isn't just some sort of abstract pattern it's actually like another system and then you see the systems which are impacting it and then you see the systems impacting the systems and i think that it doesn't take much to join those dots whereas for a lot of people it feels like quite a big leap the idea that how you decide to power a town or even your own home and how that relates to a wider global system and obviously then you get into the like oh I can't believe you took a flight and you care about climate change it's like well you know unless you're flying every day and being like some of the richest people in the world which I think it's a really tiny percent like creative I think it's something like between 50 and 80 percent of the emissions like the emissions of war are just absolutely huge and doesn't get talked about anywhere nearly enough so anyway I think that the role that music plays and the role that nature play in benefiting our mental health is just as crucial as our ability to feel the change that's happening and the sensory elements of both music and nature the sensory kind of like removal of overstimulation and being in kind of nature is so crucial which is why I'm hoping you're listening to this whilst you're out on a walk and um if you're not I hope that you're thinking about what it's like to be in nature because even just thinking about it can help um things like staring at Horizon is meant to be amazing for your brain and having that ability to see beyond things that humans have built I think often just feels really beneficial.

23:42I have really loved getting into photography this year in a much more kind of mindful and thoughtful way and going out and taking pictures in nature so if you head to my Instagram at Sean in Sound if you're not in nature you can at least see some pictures I took which I will post shortly after recording this podcast from my walk today um i went out on the chiltons um it was amazing mist and just like taking the time to set up a shot and catch the light right and frame a photo like all stuff that's really good for my brain and uh obviously you can if you want wear headphones and go and listen to things whilst you're walking

24:24this episode of the drannin sound podcast is presented in partnership with kobus the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard that has high quality audio that has human curation which as a human curator is something that i truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms you can really hear the difference i know lots of places talk about the audio qualities. And as soon as I moved across, it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music, which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists, you can use Soundiz. It's a really good tool that's part of the signup process when you join Cobuzz.

25:05It just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists, but get a free trial. You can also find these details in the show notes to this episode. And now back to this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast, brought to you in partnership with Cobuzz. So I mentioned that these conversations took place backstage at Earthsonic Live. I should really speak to one of the organisers. And I've known Hannah Overton for, I think, we worked out about 25 years.

25:42Hannah has been an A &R person, signing musicians and working on record campaigns since I've known her She's worked with some extraordinary records Hannah was one of the people who booked the speakers and kind of brought other people into the event And I'll let her introduce herself and talk you through a little bit more about what the event was Because hopefully there will be another one in 2026

26:19so hannah could you briefly introduce yourself and your involvement in some of the organizing of today i'm hannah overton i've been working for earth sonic i was the curator of the event today i've worked at rexel recordings over my time and secretly group and i currently work at warp Records. I've worked with some brilliant people over the years from Dizzy Rascal to Friendly Fires, Phoebe Bridges, Bon Iver, and have recently entered Warp Records. And of course, their legacy speaks for itself. So you've spent some time over the last, I guess, quite a few years trying to get your head around the climate movement why does an event like today which has music and climate talks together one feel rare but two feel necessary that's a very good question sean um i think firstly um i've been involved in sustainability within the music industry and then i've been involved in advocacy within the music industry and in my personal life i've been involved in direct action.

27:26And me being part of this event today, pulling those various threads together, it's made me realize that generally people are interested in climate. They're interested in what our future holds, not just for ourselves, but for our children and our grandchildren. And it's a very important topic. And it doesn't matter which side of politics you sit on, which side of the social economic spectrum you sit on. It's an interesting topic to everybody. But most people want to hear stories. They don't want to hear facts. They want to learn, but they want to do it in a gentle way that doesn't feel talked down to.

28:11They want to be part of that story. And the rare thing that we have in art and music is that we can take people along on that journey with us. It's not about being dictated to. So today's been really important. We've looked at today's event thinking about inspiring everyone who comes through the door today through the head, the heart and the soul. The head being the panels and talks and discussions. If that's what floats your boat, if you want to hear people talk, come and see a panel or a talk. The heart is about the musical performances we've had today and really feeling emotive when we're watching people playing music with plants or talking about water in their lyrics.

28:54And the sole part of it is the beautiful workshops we've had today run by some incredible organizations, whether it's making music with frog sounds in the Ableton workshop or making lanterns and sculptures with the RSPB. There's been such a range of things to get involved with today, as well as all our beautiful volunteer organizers who've been here to talk about the conservation work they're doing and the advocacy work. So I think we've put on an event that I hope has inspired people to onward climate action when they leave the museum tonight. So you've been involved in booking today, but was there anything that you've learned today that you didn't know before?

29:36Oh, I've learned a lot today. And I've also learned a lot from talking to all our guests over the past few months. I've been in such a lucky position. I've been able to talk to people about coming to join the program today. I think one of my favorite things is the Woodland Trust have a tree equity program. And what I loved about that is they talk very much about using data and Google Maps, modern technology, all these things that we have in our very, very modern world to underpin something that we all intrinsically know in that our health, our physical and our mental health is much, much better when we are surrounded by nature and surrounded by trees.

30:21And they use very simple publicly available information and data to prove that point. The areas of deprivation in our country have much lower tree canopy and they can overlay health data about the populations who live in those areas of low tree canopy and prove that they have much worse health. And in times of heat waves, the ground temperature is much, much higher, four degrees higher, six degrees higher in some places, which can obviously affect somebody with health conditions. So I think that's one of my favorite things that I've taken away from today, in that if we want to make change within the current political and capitalist system we live in, let's use those tools to make great change.

31:14Do you think the music industry is in the position or in the readiness to start making some of those changes too? There are a lot of people within music who are making change, but I do think we all need to come together in a greater way. And it's not just music. I think all the arts need to talk to each other much more about creating change. We've all got to look at our own businesses and our own sustainability so that we can talk with an authentic voice. But really, the power of our industries is to tell a story, to allow our public and people to imagine a different future. Sometimes the facts and the stories of climate change feel so overwhelming that it's really hard to think we can do something about it but the technology exists we've got it and it's really just about allowing people to imagine that future and that's that's the beauty of art and music it allows us to do that you envisage what today would look and feel and um be the sensations of it how has it felt to experience it after spending time imagining it um it's been brilliant um it went as well as i could possibly have hoped um it was the museum was really full of people of all different age ranges and it felt very diverse and brilliant and um somebody said to me earlier he said my jaw is aching because i've been grinning all day there's so many inspiring people here talking he was so happy to be part of this special event And I really hope we can repeat it and do it again.

33:03Hopefully you feel a bit more informed about what you missed. And I should probably tell you about what a couple of my highlights were of the event, because I really loved listening to the Cloud Gardener, who you may know if you watch Alan Titchmarsh's show. I'm not someone who's seen it. But when he was talking to Tory, who you heard from earlier and can hear a full interview with, he started talking about the gardens in China, how he'd been on holiday there and seen all the gardens. He'd begun the conversation talking about how to make like a really good garden for your balcony if you don't live somewhere where you can have a garden and then quickly moved into talking about what these gardens in China were like and how inspired they've been by like Victorian gardens of London and how the communist government used the gardens to improve the quality of life.

33:51So say you're getting off the tube or the subway or the bus or train or whatever it is and walking to your office you'll suddenly cross a bridge and the entire edge of the bridge will just be covered with just like beautiful flowers and they'll put trees in to make it so you can't really see the traffic and as you cross over places and it just looked they showed me they showed us all the photos on the screen and just looks so beautiful um and obviously i know there are criticisms of the communist regime and how they treat people but in some ways it looks like they at least spend some of the money to make stuff look nice and it weirdly reminded me of I grew up in Weymouth in Dorset on the south coast of England and they spend quite a lot of money making really nice flower beds on the seafront and a lot of the flowers kind of had a really similar vibe which I guess is that kind of old Victorian kind of vibe.

34:46I listened to a few other different conversations and I just thought the whole event was great but the evening turned into the most I don't know there's something subversive about seeing DJs and live music in a museum I've been to a few events over the years in art galleries and they just feel like you get like a really beautiful backdrop but whereas when Flo who I'm going to be speaking to in a moment performed they were literally underneath the skeleton of a giant whale and they did that during the day and then in the evening there was a guy called Worker W-E-R-K-H-A and he was performing with these giant screens in the same part of the museum with the giant skeleton of a whale overhead it's just really beautiful and chilled out people sitting on beanbags and um yeah like really really nice and then you walked back into the other room and there was live performance again by Flo which was just really powerful it's a project which has been backed by Earthsonic they took them to COP and they'll tell you a little bit more about it in a minute but the headliner for the evening was Groove Armada one part of Groove Armada was also speaking at the event about his wild farmed bread which having eaten that bread I did not know was made by one of Groove Armada and how sustainably it's farmed and how all the part of the process is so thought out and sustainable.

36:15And I think it's just really interesting to see that whilst obviously you get Rihanna kind of becoming a fashion mogul, there are quite a lot of musicians with projects kind of outside of music. And I think that'd be one of the things we'll explore a little bit in 2026, some of that diversification, because obviously music isn't paying people as it could do. But yes, let's go into my chat now with Flow. This is going to be a little bit different because some of the musicians are from the Amazon. There's a translator helping just ensure that everyone knew what I was saying and that I knew what they were saying.

36:50And there's definitely a little bit of a slower pace this interview, which actually is really nice to listen back to. I was thinking when I was sitting there, I was like, oh, I need to learn how to like layer the translations over the top. But actually, I'm going to leave as it is. And you can hear what everyone has to say and how they say it. um flow is a project which has come together over the past year the musicians are all solo artists or collaborators and other projects and they formed especially to perform at cop they wrote a whole record which is going to come out next year with a special documentary similar to cook and which is the one i mentioned earlier soundtrack by bicep which you should definitely try and see it's there's lots of screenings at different film festivals and climate events and music festivals over the next year.

37:40There's, yeah, the film itself, like, I don't know too much about it, but I know it's called Flow and it's about water. And it's about lots of the themes they talk about in this record. And yeah, this was me chatting to five very incredible women between their two performances. And the second performance that night was just an absolute hoot. They are so good um and yeah i will let them introduce themselves and hopefully you can follow whose voice is who this is my conversation with flo backstage at earth sonic live at manchester museum i'm jalo i'm kayla i'm sony and we are flo

38:34So my first question for you, you just come from COP. How did it feel to perform at something so kind of corporate and establishment and like somewhere musicians not going to be let in? How did it feel? I think it was, I think we weren't the only ones who were just really thrilled to be there because it wasn't a place where you'd expect to see us. I think a lot of the people who attended were also, so many people came up to tell us that they really enjoyed it and that they really felt like it was a good way to get the message across. I mean, we like breaking rules. As people felt like you were the only people doing that.

39:18And Sorinie said that she felt a lot of the receptivity of people, and people come to say, that's the problem you're doing. So you felt like you were breaking some rules. Yes. It was a place we were occupying. It was a place we were occupying. Yes, we were occupying it. Absolutely. Kayla, this is something I want to hear about Kayla's feelings. Because Kayla is local. Kayla is from the Amazonia. and you know, how did you feel? Yes. How did you feel?

40:22It was not a place that was very open to people, the local artists, it was very restricted to us. Kayla said that, yes, she is a local, but she was not invited to be on COP30 by the honor or by the people inside there. So thanks to Ruth, she was invited. And that's why she occupied that space because of Ruth. Because people there, maybe seems not to be so interesting about it. I don't believe the leaders were prepared to hear our demands. She didn't believe that the real leaders over there were prepared to listen to hear their questions and their urgent issues. Their concerns. Yes, their concerns.

41:35So, what was the message that you sent you to COP? What message did you have from the COP? You have some? You have to go there or you have to go there? What message did you have from the COP? I believe that, for the first time, the North Brazil and the Amazon were in the protagonism, showing their culture, their way of living, their energy, especially people who are extremely incredible, very happy, our culture is rich, our culinary is rich. And beyond the climate event itself, the people who are most facing the climate change were receiving all of them and wanting to show their value to the world.

42:30So Kayla was saying that maybe it was the first time that the world actually look at Amazon, to their culture, their food, music, and colors, and energy, and their happiness. And as she was saying, this is very important because people from there are the ones who most suffer with the climate changes in a way, you know? So this can be... Belen is one of the first cities that will become inhabitable in at least 70, 30 years, if things don't change. Belen is one of the cities that maybe will over in the past 70 years if things not change, and... So what? It will... It will... Yeah, yeah, as in what?