Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus

A critical guide to the experimental music compositions of Australian composer Liza Lim's post-climate crisis album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus.

When humans have gone, what will become of singing? Across her 2020 album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus, Liza Lim dreams of how nature itself would sing on that first morning after the death of humanity. Creaking vestiges of Western music swirl in oceanic gyres with choruses of bioluminescent fish; plastic trash is taught to sing by magical animating forces; and music itself rises in the absence of all humans to speak in tongues we will never understand.

In this roving collection of essays, Ty Bouque traces the many currents of Lim’s album to better understand how music might teach us to imagine timescales and environments beyond our own. Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus unpacks Australian music’s most profound statement on the climate crisis to date, and asks, without the promise of an answer: what would be the music of a drowned, post-human world?