Brian D’Souza, who performs as Auntie Flo, has released Plants Can Dance. This compilation gathers electronic producers who treat nature as a collaborative partner rather than a passive subject.
Plants Can Dance by A State Of Flo
D’Souza says he has developed a new respect for the natural world through this project. He has previously shown plant-based sonic experiments at the Tate and the V&A. He notes that 80 percent of the population now lives in cities surrounded by concrete. He views this work as breaking through those layers to uncover a hidden world. Sound serves as the entry point to re-tune his perspective on the living ecosystem around us.
“Through biosonification I can interpret the world of other living entities and share this with people in ways that traditional music making or performing hasn’t allowed,” says Jason Singh, whose track Tsubaki appears on the record.
“By mimicking the natural world through my voice, I feel a deeper connection with both my internal and external environment. The more I explore, the more I find out that I know very little about nature and that there is so much to learn.”
The methods behind each electronic piece differ. Some projects interpret plant biodata into sound, while others translate wind patterns into compositions. The results vary and remain engaging. Contributors include Modern Biology, Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, OMMA, and Jason Singh.
If you visited the Hideout venue in Hackney Wick recently, you might have seen D’Souza and his fellow explorers at Plants Can Dance events. These nights are not the usual kind. There is arguably as much soil as there are synthesisers and modular equipment. Discussions and workshops run alongside the music, with everyone encouraged to contribute. The concept for Plants Can Dance began with a commission for a project called Dandelion at the UK’s Unboxed festival in 2021.
“The project was all about vertical farming,” D’Souza explains. “They positioned these boxes they called Cubes Of Perpetual Light around remote locations around Scotland, with a surround sound set up inside that you could immerse yourself in if you encountered them.” He made his piece using MIDI captures of herbs around his garden – sage, basil and rosemary – using a PlantWave device.
Field recording was D’Souza’s initial way into working with plants. He always undertook this practice via his phone. He was encouraged to amplify this part of his work via a course with Cabaret Voltaire’s field recording expert, Chris Watson.
“I spent thousands of pounds on a variety of mics and that got me deeper down the path of trying to capture the natural world through sound,” D’Souza explains. “I then went on a week-long CAMP.Fr course on Ecoacoustics, which provided more inspiration and direction when it came to the purpose of using sound as a means of connecting with nature.” He adds that the simple act of listening deeply and intently was a revelation, made possible through the field recording techniques he had learned.
Helen Anahita Wilson’s work is strictly in biophilic composition as opposed to biosonification. Her approach translates plant processes, then embeds this data within her compositions to create music that tunes into an organism’s character.
“My way into this kind of plant-derived work – which I call biophilic music – was through working with medicinal plants and wanting to raise awareness of the natural derivation of certain pharmaceutical drugs,” Helen states. “I was, and still am, very interested in creating plant-derived biophilic music for healthcare settings.”
“My projects under the name PLANT VOX are also examples of using herbs and medicinal plants to create music which aims to create the same effect on the listener as if they had ingested those plants,” she says. “Listening to a piece of music that helps you get to sleep, made from plants that also have that same soporific quality.”
D’Souza’s interest in working with plants accelerated during the COVID lockdown. It solidified over several artistic commissions, including Mushroom Music for the mycelium pavilion at Glastonbury and sonifying a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Although he believed these nature-based projects would be one-offs, conversations and experiments continued to expand.
“Through my various projects, I started to meet musicians around the world who are on a similar journey to me,” he says. “So the compilation is a way of bringing all these approaches together under one roof, which will hopefully inspire more to get into nature-inspired music. The lesson is, once you start putting yourself out there, you end up meeting other likeminded souls and that helps you grow a community, both locally and online.”
Jason Singh got on board through a mutual connection with D’Souza. With roots in the Punjab in North India, his great-grandmother was a Hakim, a plant-wisdom holder and healer who worked with plants from the forest to help people.
“Indian music is an ancient system where melody and rhythm is directly derived through nature via the seasons, time of day, colours, animals, insects and the planets,” he says. “I have been raised with this so the relationship has always been there, not as something experimental or academic but direct and experiential. I was raised on Indian ragas through Indian classical and folk music, and this flowed through me from an early age.”
Initially, Jason started using specialist microphones and was influenced by the electronic music of artists like Mileece, Eberhard Schoener and Charles Dodge. As technology became cheaper and more open source, he purchased a MIDI Sprout device. This enabled him to connect plants to his hardware and powered his piece, Tsubaki.
“This is the Japanese word for Camellia, and was originally part of a long-form piece I created for an eight speaker sound installation at The Camellia House in Woolaton Park in Nottingham,” he states.
“People come from all over the world to see the Camellia bloom in late winter/early spring and I wanted to create a sound installation where not only could people experience the visual aesthetic of the flowers but also affect the mood and emotion of the space through the hidden music created by the plants themselves.”
There was also a plant music concert where musicians played live with the Camellia. Jason reworked a section of the piece and his friend, cellist Liz Hanks, played a really emotional composition to accompany the Camellias composition.
Jason used a MIDI Sprout device to capture the plant data, then played the MIDI files via Ableton. He did this through a range of pads, effects and bespoke plugins designed by Leafcutter John. He also used Arturia’s Pigment synth as he really likes the pad sounds in that software synth.
Helen’s approach is aimed at expressing the characteristics of the organisms rather than compiling an archive of plant recordings.
“I like to work with bioelectricity monitors, conductivity monitors such as PlantWave and the Pocket Scion, real audio recordings, and with botanical analyses and genetic data to record and find interesting little patterns which seem musical to me in some way,” she says.
“Once I spot something promising in the plant biodata that I can translate into rhythms and pitches, then I develop that fragment using techniques from Western and South Asian musics that can convey characteristics and behaviours of the plants involved,” Helen continues. “I always use Ableton for this kind of work. In Porcupine and the Outdoor Girls I used data recordings and botanical information from the toxic Porcupine tomato and the edible Outdoor Girl tomato as the original source material for the composition.”
D’Souza’s track Hector’s Sunflower opens the compilation and was inspired by his son and the sunflower seeds he was gifted at school.
“It was fun to watch them flower and the sunflowers to grow over the course of last summer,” he explains. “I originally took some MIDI readings throughout various stages in its lifecycle but ended up not using them and instead recording a whole album in a day, which came out on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By in January.”
While the Plants Can Dance compilation brings these diverse methods together, the underlying goal remains consistent. The producers are not just recording nature; they are using technology to translate biological data into music that connects people with the living world. For the people making things, this means moving away from standard synthesiser patches toward data-driven workflows. It requires specific hardware like MIDI Sprout or PlantWave to capture signals, followed by processing in DAWs like Ableton. The result is a shift in how creators perceive their tools, treating them as bridges to the environment rather than just instruments for sound generation.
