Berlin is probably the best city in Europe to make music live with nightingales, because of its spacious parks and the large number of enthusiastically singing birds. Strangely enough, nighttime nightingale jamming doesn’t seems to be as popular an activity as one might expect, but we have shown that it does actually work. Almost everything one plays to a nightingale will encourage him to sing more. What is it like to play along with a nightingale? It becomes a direct window into the unknown, a touch of communication with a being with whom we cannot speak. The play of pure tones jarring against click and buzz, it all becomes not a code but a groove, an amphitheater of rhythms in which we strive to find a place. David Rothenberg and Korhan Erel went out at midnight to these urban woods last year to jam with these fabulous singing nachtigals. David is a clarinetist and writer known for his work with creatures of all kinds. He records on the ECM label and travels the world looking for unusual animal musicians to engage with. Korhan is a Turkish electronic musician now living in Berlin, adept at sampling the birds live in their forest habitat. About half the tunes on the album are live human/nightingale encounters, and the rest are constructions mixing clarinets and electronic mysteries. Even when we are back in the studio the possibility of contacting the musical mind of the nightingale still influenced us. The resulting album, Berlin Bülbül, that’s nightingale in Turkish, features the next step in the evolution of human-avian interspecies music. David Rothenberg, bass clarinet, clarinet, effects Korhan Erel, Samplr on iPad, Omnibus nightingales live in the parks of Berlin ECM recording artist David Rothenberg has performed and recorded on clarinet with Marilyn Crispell, Jan Bang, Scanner, Glen Velez, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He has twelve CDs out under his own name, including "On the Cliffs of the Heart," named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine and “One Dark Night I Left My Silent House,” a duet album with pianist Marilyn Crispell, called “une petite miracle” by Le Monde and named by The Village Voice one of the ten best CDs of 2010. Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, book and CD, published in seven languages and the subject of a BBC television documentary. He is also the author of numerous other books on music, art, and nature, including Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales, and Survival of the Beautiful, about aesthetics in evolution. His book and CD Bug Music, featuring the sounds of the entomological world, has been featured on PBS News Hour and in the New Yorker. His last recording was Cicada Dream Band. Korhan Erel is a computer musician, improviser, sound designer based in Berlin. He plays instruments he designs on a computer by employing various controllers. He also uses analog and digital electronics. He is a founding member of Islak Köpek, Turkey’s pioneer free improvisation group, which is regarded as the band that started the free improvisation scene in Turkey. He composes and designs sounds for dance, theater, installations and film. He collaborates with dancers, video artists and spoken word artists. Korhan’s collaboration with Sydney-based video artist Fabian Astore “The Threshold” has won the Blake Prize in Australia in 2012. Korhan’s computer performance system is called Omnibus. The instruments within Omnibus are a culmination of Korhan’s musical past and aesthetic choices. Omnibus instruments use concrete sounds (samples, field recordings), morphed and processed in realtime. No matter what technology he uses, Korhan always stays focused on the outcome and musicality rather than processes. Korhan has had three residencies at STEIM (Center for research & development of instruments & tools for performers) in Amsterdam, where he studied use of sensors in music performance and instrument design. He was a guest composer at the Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm in January 2011.