Photo: Alexander Deprez

Echoes of Zoo are gearing up to release their third album, Collective Intelligence, arriving on October 2nd through Rebel Up! and Zephyrus Records.. Led by founder and saxophonist Nathan Daems, alongside Bart Vervaeck, Lieven Van Pée and Falk Schrauwen, the Belgian quartet continue to refine a distinctive musical language that draws from jazz, psychedelic rock, dub, African rhythmic traditions and adventurous improvisation. Collective Intelligence takes inspiration from the ways animals coordinate as swarms, herds and flocks, using that natural intelligence as both a musical starting point and a hopeful call for humans to cooperate, communicate and face global challenges together. Daems comments:

“The collective intelligence that we’re after is reflected in the music in a direct way – by the way we play together and how we function as a band. When we play together, we act as one. We can only be a good band if we display a form of sophisticated collective intelligence.”

Following ‘Flock Logic’, the album’s exhilarating first single, which grew out of the band’s time touring Brazil in early 2024, Echoes of Zoo have unleashed a second single, the effervescent ‘Higher Levels’. The title draws directly on the album’s wider fascination with animal communication and coordination, as Daems explains:

“The title points to the sophisticated ways animals communicate and coordinate as one, to what we casually call telepathy, though that label says more about our own limits than what’s actually possible in nature.”

He adds:

“On this tune, we channel our love for the bittersweet melancholy of West African highlife, then push it into new territory with quarter tones — notes between the usual 12 pitches of piano and guitar — and time-stretched grooves that sit between strict mathematical subdivisions.”

Listen to ‘Higher Levels’ now.

There’s wonderful news from Echoes of Zoo, who have announced their third album, Collective Intelligence, arriving on October 2nd through Rebel Up! and Zephyrus Records. Bringing together Nathan Daems, Bart Vervaeck, Lieven Van Pée and Falk Schrauwen, whose credits also include other favourite outfits like Black Flower, Compro Oro and De Beren Gieren, the Belgian quartet continue to refine a distinctive musical language that draws from jazz, psychedelic rock, dub, African rhythmic traditions and adventurous improvisation. Inspired by the collective behaviour found throughout the natural world, the forthcoming Collective Intelligence takes swarms, flocks and ecosystems as its central point of departure. The album explores the forms of cooperation and communication that emerge between species, asking what they might reveal about the ways humans organise, respond and coexist.

Leading the announcement is ‘Flock Logic’, an exhilarating and electrifying first single sparked by the band’s time touring Brazil in early 2024. Watching vast flocks of birds move in perfect synchrony, while absorbing the infectious rhythmic energy of carnival, planted the seeds for the track. Echoes of Zoo comment:

“We had seen flocks of birds whirling in the sky and were wondering how they could navigate collectively as one mind. The madness of the carnival helped us to percolate some ideas for grooves and melodies into a hypnotic frenzy which finally became this energetic song.”

Listen to ”Flock Logic’ below.

Belgian outfit Echoes of Zoo announced last month the release of their new album titled Speech of Species, and alongside it shared ‘Bee Jive’, an exhilarating track with balkan inflections and tinged with oriental ebullience. Ahead of the album release on May 12th through W.E.R.F. Records, they are teasing the record again with second single ‘Echolocation’, a scorching and playful track fusing “cumbia with dub with rock with jazz”. As Echoes of Zoo describe, ‘Echolocation’ is “an ode to bats, dolphins and other species who use a unique principle to be able to see, in the form of a fat cumbia groove”. The single comes accompanied by an animated video made by Laura Matikainen and you can watch it below.

Photo: Grégoire Verbeke

Beginning life in Belgium in 2018, Echoes of Zoo is the brainchild project of Nathan Daems, also comprising Bart Vervaeck, Lieven Van Pée and Falk Schrauwen. Following their 2021 debut album, BREAKOUT, they have announced the release of a new album titled Speech of Species. Slated for a May 12th release through W.E.R.F. Records, the new record remains true to the quartet’s heady fusion of psychedelic jazz, dub and rock with a punk edge, and the feel-good feel of a marching band. Continuing to pour out a relentlessly pulsing sonic energy, on the upcoming album, Echoes of Zoo “experiment with Eastern and Balkan sounds, microtonal guitars, animalistic sounds, and a host of new rhythmic observations based on Brazilian and West African grooves”, as the press release describes. Speech of Species centres on the theme of animal communication, as Daems explains:

“Messages are constantly being transmitted in the animal world by adopting body poses; there are more than 2,000 different poses or “words” in certain lizard species, by dancing in the most ingenious ways, by changing colours from geometric patterns (certain species of squids and chameleons do this), by causing vibrations in the ground, by smells, even by giving light and so on. How can we be so blind to that and say that animals cannot speak?”

With balkan inflections and tinged with oriental ebullience, ‘Bee Jive’ serves as the first exhilarating taste to emerge from the album. The track is inspired by a chaotic beehive and “based on a Senegalese Sabar rhythm, spiced with short Balkan riffs on saxophone and an energetic oriental guitar solo”.  Take a listen below.