We met the people at Quinta Messejana last year. They’ve been building the project for three years now, slowly and by hand, and a good friend of ours now heads its newest strand, Make Forests Great Again, which begins with its first volunteer weekend at the end of this month.

The idea is simple: turn green deserts back into forests. Much of Portugal’s hillside is planted with single-crop timber. It looks green from the road, but very little else lives there. Make Forests Great Again sets out to change that, starting with one hillside.

The first volunteer weekend runs at the end of October. A few spots are still available, but it’s nearly full, so get in touch soon if you’d like to join.

On Saturday 31st October, our good friends Maria Amor and Shcuro, aka Paraiso, will play under the trees with us to mark the end of the first day’s work.
Expect spooky ambient for Halloween night (not yet confirmed 😉).

Paraiso soundtracked Saturday afternoon at Bush of Ghosts last year, and it’s a pleasure to play with them on home turf in Portugal.

There’ll be a small bar, and the gig is open to everyone, whether or not you’ve spent the day planting.

If you’d like to come, email hello@makeforestsgreatagain.com, and we’ll send you the details. 🌲 🎃

Cutting 02 - Field Maneuvers 2026

Propagate: live sets taken from ‘out in the field’ and given somewhere new to grow

Back to Saturday night at the amazing Field Maneuvers 2026, where we kept the chill-out space going into the early hours.

Next up from the Seeds family is Kayla Painter, who released 012 on the label. Her set came billed as Ambient Owl Core, recorded live in the tent as the night turned over.

Check Field Maneuvers Dot Com for 27 details

The first, but hopefully not the last, of an occasional series of guest posts comes from our good friend Joe Clay, who co-founded Bytes with me. Launched in April 2019, Bytes is an outlet for abstract electronics, music aimed at home listening and moments of pensive thought, with releases from the likes of Minotaur Shock, GLOK, Franz Kirmann, Herrmann Kristoffersen and jik. Joe and I first met in the mid-90s, working behind the counter of the once-mighty, now-defunct Our Price in Bath, and we’ve been swapping records ever since. As I’ve admitted before, Seeds owes him more than a few recommendations: we lifted the name wholesale from Music For Plants, the ambient column Joe wrote for Ransom Note with his wife Ali.

So it only seemed fair to hand him the keys - temporarily, you understand! - and here he goes digging into the electronic Christian ambient of Sally Daley, a Chicago church musician who made tapes for herself and God.

I am not a religious person (spiritual, at a push), but if I walked into a church and heard the warm drones of Sally Daley’s organ coming from the pipes I might just be converted. At the very least I would sit down and listen. For many years Daley (who died in 2020) worked as musical director at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Chicago, while also releasing a series of cassettes in the late-1980s and early-1990s on her own Tau-Spirit Music Productions label. Her recordings range from early music and classical to avant-garde and ambient, but some of her music has been classified as part of a micro-milieu called “electronic Christian ambient music” or (as one wag on YouTube puts it) Oneohtrix Point Heaven.

Not many of the 15 or so cassettes Daley released are available to listen to now. The excellent Ultravillage website has published a selected discography online, which includes My God and My All, a cassette released in 1990 that is the high point of her output. Daley’s billowing, otherworldly synthesiser excursions sound uncannily like something James Ferraro would have released in the late-Noughties (think Discovery/Clear)

or REREX 1 and 2

This has something to do with the tape hiss that permeates the recordings, but as with Ferraro’s oeuvre from that period, the feeling Daley’s music evokes is one of complete submersion in her strange, aquatic drones - there is even the odd keyboard effect that sounds like a dolphin call. The titular piece is subtitled ‘A Seaside Meditation’, so this is not an accident.

Others have compared this release to Boards of Canada, Laaraji and the music from Zelda. It’s also amazing to think that it emerged at the same time the KLF and the Orb were introducing New Age flavours to their brand of ambient-dance. However, it seems unlikely that Daley was aware of anything happening outside her liturgical world. She was making these Sacred Ambient Works only for herself and God.

My God and My All was released digitally on Bandcamp in May by Midair Museum

…an ambient and New Age reissue label based in New York. The hope is that they have been granted access to Daley’s full catalogue and will start making some more of it available. Moonscape, originally released in 1993, is of particular interest: according to Ultravillage it is “tonal, spectral synth music with little discernible structure, careening from one bizarre melody to the next”. Autechrist? Can’t wait!

bytes23.bandcamp.com/

Propagate: live sets taken from ‘out in the field’ and given somewhere new to grow

Live from Saturday at the amazing Field Maneuvers 2026, where we tended the chill-out space into the early hours.

Seeds artists, friends and adjacent - this one’s an extended set from the great Stella Z who released the excellent 005 Seeds album Fig with us last year.

Check Field Maneuvers Dot Com for 27 details

Ibukun Sunday makes music to “meet people in their intensity and guide them toward peace.” Lagos-born, now in north London, he’s spent years translating that intensity into ambient work built from West African rhythmic sensibilities, deep drone, and a trained violist’s ear - a sound cultivated across releases for Phantom Limb and its Spirituals imprint, and most recently on this year’s Olúsín [Worshippers], a record about faith, devotion, and the silence between notes.

His Seeds Mix, Rooted in Shadow, starts somewhere darker and stays there. Sunday works to four private principles - time in seasons rather than bars, rhythm that stays steady, sound and harmony, structure. Field recordings - leaves, water in a cave, soil being turned - get time-stretched into pads rather than backdrop.

It’s also Seeds Mix 13, a number with its own reputation. Sunday’s not fighting the omen.

You’ve said rushing kills the plant and the music both, and the beauty’s in the wait. Does this shadow side require a different kind of patience, or is it the same wait either way?

That’s where the best music lives, I think. In Seeds Mix 13. The track where you didn’t fill every space, where you let the silence be heavy, where the light only comes through for 4 seconds at the end.

You said environmental sounds tell the plants’ growth within the music, not just set the scene. Was shadow itself treated like a collaborator here, similar to water or wind?

Yes. 100%. If water is the pulse and wind is the sway, then shadow is the soil.

I didn’t just “set the scene” with darkness in Seeds Mix 13. I let shadow do work, the same way I let water and birds do work.

Water gives rhythm. Wind gives motion.

Shadow gives weight. It’s the low end, the sub, the reverb tail that never fully decays. It’s what makes the light matter when it hits. Without shadow, that burst through the trees in your photo would just be bright. With shadow, it’s revelation.

It’s Seeds Mix 13. Thirteen’s got its own shadow reputation - unlucky, left off buildings, uneasy. Do you think this was fate’s intervention or just how the numbers landed?

Mix 13 carries a shadow. Skipped floors, crossed fingers, the “bad omen” story we all learned. But look at the image again: trees growing out of stone, light forcing its way through. That’s 13 to me.

You’re originally from Lagos - does shadow mean something different there, given the heat and light, than it might somewhere greyer and colder?

Yes. It means something completely different. Shadow in Lagos and shadow in North London aren’t the same plant.

Lagos shadow is never quiet. It’s danfo horns softened, music leaking from a bar, rain hitting a zinc roof but you’re dry underneath. Shadow holds the noise instead of killing it.

So shadow in Lagos feels generous. It’s not “dark.” It’s cool.

So what happens when you carry both? You end up with a different kind of patience.

Lagos taught you: shadow is a place to rest and still grow.

London taught you: shadow is a season to endure and still grow.

Your music leans on the silence between notes as its own kind of faith. Does tending a plant call for that same patience, waiting on something you can’t rush or fully see?

Silence is faith. When you let a note ring and then don’t play the next one, you’re saying: “I trust that what we’ve planted here is enough for now. I trust time will do the rest.” That’s devotion. That’s Worshippers. Rushing it kills both the plant and the music. The beauty is in waiting with it.

Olúsín [Worshippers] is out now.

Tracklist:

Ryan J Raffa – Sound of the Mountains
Henrik Meierkord – Skogsgränsen
Ibukun Sunday – Last Earth Ibukun Sunday – Distance / No Turning Back
Ibukun Sunday – Edge

I started running ‘seriously ’- by that I mean not just a few k around the park, grumbling to myself - during a particularly difficult time in my life, and quickly came to realise how it helped to calm my busy mind - what I now recognise, self-diagnosed, as ADHD. Then I started using running apps and lost that peace. I pushed harder, chased faster times. Looking back, the calm I’d thought I’d found turned into stress.

Later this month will be eight years since my mother died suddenly - one of those moments that reroutes everything after it, whether you notice it at the time or not. What followed was many years of unresolved grief, anxiety and a lot of pain. I guess running became a way to avoid that grief, rather than face it. I treated it like a problem I could out-train, the same way the apps turned stillness into another target to hit.

That was the pattern for a while - pace, mileage, outrunning grief that had nowhere else to go. Then, without planning it, the music changed and so did the running. Thinking about it now, I don’t think that’s a coincidence - it’s all tangled up with running this label and my own relationship with the plant world too. It wasn’t just one album, but months of listening to ambient-adjacent - probably around two hundred kilometres if I’m checking my app - before I noticed I wasn’t running from the grief any more. Somewhere in there, without meaning to, I’d started running with it instead. So much so that I’d begin queuing up albums for my runs… something recommended by a friend, something I’d discovered on a Reddit thread - the ambient music thread on there is actually amazing - or whatever.

I’ve known Cynthia Bernard’s work as marine eyes for a while - back in lockdown, my friend Joe Clay of Bytes shared her album chamomile with me, and like most things he recommends, I was instantly hooked on the hazy, lysergic ambience that emanated from it.

Cynthia works out of LA, splitting her time between marine eyes solo and two other projects - one third of Almost An Island, one half of Awakened Souls Music - alongside running Cloud Collecting, a label and community built around ambient music, art and curation, centring women and gender-expansive artists on the idea that “music can heal and help us feel both lost and found.”

This month she sent me ‘hidden hour’, out on Cloud Collecting later this month - her fourth solo album, and the first full-length on her own label. The title alone felt like it already knew what I’d been doing all this time…

Cynthia’s grandmother had a stroke that took her speech but not her ability to sing - which is where her interest in music as a form of therapy began. hidden hour is eighteen songs, one hour exactly, written across a year of private moments - a bridge near an oak - the Oak of the Golden Dream, as it turns out, the same one Harold Budd once wrote about

a mountaintop in Los Padres, a tea hut in the Mendocino redwoods. Lap steel, piccolo guitar, mandolin, synth, and two collaborators - Líom and Dimming - brought in from opposite corners of Europe.

In her words, it’s “an invitation to slow down, listen closely, and create nourishing time that’s within our grasp.” In other words; the opposite of the apps.

I started therapy myself a year ago, to work through this grief properly. August was my first month without it, since my therapist - like most sensible people in Lisbon - took the month off. Without really deciding to, I found my own version of it: running to an ambient album start to finish, letting the record decide when I’d turn around instead of an app telling me how far I should go.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, I felt like something shifted. The grief was still there - I know it always will be - but it stopped feeling like something I had to wrestle with. It started feeling more like the weather; moving across me, instead of something I had to outrun.

Pauline Oliveros spent a career on the difference between hearing and listening - between sound arriving and attention actually meeting it. Running to ‘hidden hour’ was when I finally noticed what all those months of pounding those ambient miles had already been doing to my grief. It had given it room, room to breathe.

Which is a long and winding way of saying: run to this album from start to finish. You’ll work out why halfway through, and you won’t look back.

I’m still learning to let things take the time they need. The grief hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just found room to sit with me now.

Some days that’s enough.

‘hidden hour’ is out on 23rd September.

There’s a listening party happening on Bandcamp too on 22nd September.

Photos: hidden hour recording locations by Cynthia

The Cape Gooseberry (Physalis peruviana) grows inside its own lantern. Each fruit is wrapped in a papery husk, inflated and near-translucent, that hangs on the plant like something already lit from within before you’ve even opened it - a design shared with its relative, the Chinese lantern plant, and one that’s made it a favourite in gardens for looks alone. Native to the Andes, it travels under different names depending on where it lands: Inca berry, golden berry, ground cherry. It’s a plant that’s been prized and treated as a weed in equal measure, depending entirely on where it’s growing and who’s doing the growing - naturalised and often invasive across warm climates worldwide, including parts of Australia itself. That same adaptability was part of the draw for Alex too - a plant that’ll grow more or less anywhere means most of Soda Lite’s listeners, wherever they are, can actually grow the one this record is named after.

A gooseberry plant took root in the sand between the bricks of Alex’s back patio - nutrient-deficient leaves and all - and fruited regardless. That’s most of the appeal: “I’m drawn to species that survive in the interstices of human industrialisation.” The husk itself carries the same idea, shielding the berry until it’s ready to be let go.

Past Soda Lite records - Earthbound, Aqua Solar Cura, Vale & Stone - built outward from field recordings first. Here that flipped: you can’t field-record a plant, only the noise around it, so only two tracks (‘Vibrant Matter’ and ‘An Sí Gaoithe’) carry field sound at all. The rest came from narrowing to a single species instead of the wider non-human world, and “trying to create and replicate sound and energy on the level of the plant and its perceptive world.”

Two more things worth knowing. ‘Bryn Celli Ddu’ takes its name from a Neolithic burial chamber in Wales, aligned so the summer solstice sunlight reaches its back wall - the sun turning up again as its own recurring character. And ‘An Sí Gaoithe (Return)’ is a reworking of a Vale & Stone title, old fragments reprocessed into something new - “a bit like composting.”

Soda Lite is the recording project of Alex Last, a gardener and composer working from Lutruwita on unceded Palawa land. Their music moves through field recordings gathered directly from the island’s own biomes - coastline, forest, alkaline lake bed - alongside slow, warbling synth work, built less as backdrop than as document: proof of a specific place, at a specific time, being listened to closely. Past records have taken their titles and themes from geology and land relationships as often as botany - Aqua Solar Cura, Earthbound, Vale & Stone - so a plant with its own mineral-adjacent etymology (soda, found in dried alkaline lakebeds; lite, from the Greek for stone) suits the pairing.

As with every edition on this label, the cassette comes with a packet of seeds (for UK orders) and a fact card about the plant. 🌱

Pre-Order HERE

Tracklist & Notes

01. Emerald Armour - the soft green calyx that shields the ripening berry; emergence, sunlight, a first leaf.
02. Coralli - the old Italian name for the gooseberry; granular synthesis, roots establishing, sound swirling upward through shared channels.
03. Grasp of the Earth - named after The Ruin, an 8th/9th-century Old English elegy about building out of ruins.
04. Feorh Folde - Old English for spirit and earth; layered nutrients, layered root systems, repeating cycles.
05. Bryn Celli Ddu - the solstice alignment, up close; energy circulating, wind, water, heat.
06. The High Wide Gate Has Collapsed - also drawn from The Ruin; overcast, autumn.
07. Vibrant Matter - the berry at its sweetest and most acidic, high summer; title borrowed from Jane Bennett’s book on vital materialism.
08. An Sí Gaoithe (Return) - the Vale & Stone rework, old sounds composted into new.
09. Ripening Sun - dusk, autumn; the berry and the sun as dual metaphors.
10. Nova Epoko - Esperanto for “New Age,” and not that at all: toil before hope, ending as ambiguous as it starts.

Preview the album:

About Soda Lite
Soda Lite is the recording name of Alex Last, a composer based on the island of Lutruwita (Tasmania), working on unceded Palawa land. Alex is an artist, musician and teacher who spends as much time as possible outdoors - birdwatching, hiking, kayaking - an interest in the natural world that runs directly into the music itself, built from field recordings gathered from the island’s own biomes: coastline, forest, alkaline lake bed. Past releases, including Earthbound, Aqua Solar Cura, and Vale & Stone, have taken their titles and themes from geology and land relationships as much as from botany, treating the landscape as collaborator, as opposed just a backdrop.

If this is your first time hearing Soda Lite, worth going back through the catalogue - Earthbound (2025), Aqua Solar Cura (2022), and Vale & Stone (2019, home to the original “An Sí Gaoithe”) are all here:

Earthbound (2025)

Aqua Solar Cura (2022)

Vale & Stone (2019)

Credits
Composed, performed and mixed by Alex Last
Artwork by Daniel Hermann
Mastered by Justin Drake
Special thanks to Chloe, Hazel, Daphne, Liffey, Kria, Lloyd, Tia & Wil

Releases October 28, 2026

Sound-wise, it’s the same juxtaposition that ran through Passiflora – birdsong, wind, bells and found nature sitting right up against synthetic tone, warmer where it can be. KiF have form for throwing in fake, synthesised birdsong purely to mess with the spotters, so don’t take anything chirping out of the speakers entirely at face value. As the mix moves from day to night, the sound follows: brighter and busier in the early stretch, sliding towards darker, slower and more dreamlike as the light drops, the shift gradual rather than a hard cut.

It’s not made in a vacuum either. Simon Armstrong from Errant slipped them a couple of tracks that ended up soundtracking dusk. Rob at Be With handed over a Hatchback cut before it even hit his own label. Gardens In The Sky drifted in via a mix from our very own Tia Cousins for Test Pressing. It is less a finished object, more the latest exchange in an ongoing conversation between friends who keep sending each other music.

Our old friend Keith McIvor haunts this one too, gently. His lockdown-era Tranquillity Mixes are where KiF first heard Inoyama Land, who show up in the dawn section, and a Saturday morning set at Watching Trees’ Bush of Ghosts this year fed straight into the whole thing taking shape.
Asked what plant they’d be, Will and Tom eventually landed on a coppiced hazel in a holloway – practical, long-lived, on good terms with humans, and sat under centuries of falling leaves (“plenty of samples,” as they point out) – two hours of KiF thinking like that particular tree.
Sit down, shut up, watch the light move.

Who are you?

KiF Productions is the creative partnership of Will Cookson and Tom Haverly. Since being teenagers we’ve enjoyed creating all sorts of stuff together such as cartoons, collages, characters, slang and so on but in 2023 we started making sample-based music and sound collages together. Our first release was Still Out, a homage to the KLF’s Chill Out. We’re both Gloucestershire-based and have an ongoing obsession with creating sounds that explore journeys, nature and memory.

Why are you here?

The idea of making something that could accompany moments of quiet and observation really appealed to us, especially coming straight off working on Passiflora. So much of what we do is inspired by nature, landscape and the feeling of being present in a particular place at a particular time of the day, that the idea of making something to accompany those moments felt very natural to us.

We imagined it as something you might listen to while taking time to ‘be’ in a garden, on common land or in a park — a companion to pottering, sitting, looking and simply being there. We approached the mix as another kind of journey: immersive and slow-moving, giving the music space to breathe, gradually unfolding and building as it goes.

Passiflora followed the passionflower through its entire lifecycle, seed to fruit and back again. Did you find yourself thinking in a similar arc for this mix – a beginning, middle and end to the day – or did dawn-to-dusk pull you toward something looser?

There was definitely a sense of an arc, but we didn’t want to make it too literal. With Passiflora, the lifecycle gave us a natural structure to work within, whereas with the Seeds Mix we were more interested in the feeling of a day unfolding.

The first hour was made very much with dawn in mind — that feeling of the world slowly waking up, the light changing and everything gradually coming into focus. The second hour moves towards dusk, becoming more reflective and inward as the light fades and the day begins to settle.

So there is a clear beginning and end, but we wanted the journey between the two to remain loose and organic. More like spending a whole day outside and noticing how the atmosphere, light and energy around you slowly change, rather than following a conventional narrative. The mix is really intended to accompany that process rather than dictate it.

Passiflora leaned on collaborators — Piers Partridge, Fidel Cutstro, and others named as inspirations track by track. Is this mix a solo KiF piece, or does it carry any of that same collaborative spirit?

Although the Seeds Mix is a KiF mix, it definitely carries that same collaborative spirit. Community and sharing music are a big part of what we’re about, and there’s always a feed of people, mixes and conversations leading into what we’re making.

Simon Armstrong from Errant shared some tracks with us, a couple of which ended up in the dusk section of the mix. Rob from Be With Records also shared the Hatchback track, which he’s releasing on his label soon. And we discovered Gardens In The Sky, which ended up on the dawn side, through a mix Tia did for Test Pressing.

So although we’re putting the mix together, it’s definitely not created in isolation. It feels more like part of an ongoing exchange of music, ideas and recommendations between friends and people whose work we really like.

You’ve spoken about wanting sounds to “evolve like a seed underground, forming in darkness before emerging into light.” Does that same principle guide this mix?

Yes, definitely. That idea of slow, almost imperceptible change was very much in our minds when putting the mix together. Plants don’t suddenly transform from one state to another; growth is gradual, and a lot of it happens unseen. We wanted the music to behave in a similar way, with things emerging slowly, overlapping and evolving rather than arriving fully formed.

There’s a sense of moving from darkness into light, but also of allowing things to take their time. Small textures and details appear, develop and recede, sometimes almost without you noticing. We’re interested in that kind of subtle movement — music that rewards staying with it rather than constantly demanding your attention.

That felt particularly appropriate for the Seeds Mix. It’s designed as something to settle into, where the changes are gradual and the overall shape only really reveals itself as you move through it.

What role does silence or pauses play in evoking the growth process in your music?

If we’re being honest, we often struggle to incorporate silence. We’re naturally drawn to collage and to filling the space with sounds, textures and little details. But the time of day was very much in our minds when making the mix, and that gave the music a sense of space without us having to deliberately leave big gaps of silence.

You can hear that in the way the mix gradually builds. It begins with more sparse, minimal pieces, reflecting that stillness and openness of dawn, before slowly introducing more layers, movement and eventually fuller-blown songs. As it moves towards dusk, things begin to open up again and become more spacious and reflective.

So perhaps we found our own way of thinking about silence — not necessarily as the absence of sound, but as the space between things and the amount of room we allow the music to breathe.

We know we’re probably getting into cliché territory here, but it really is a journey… man.

How do you feel when you see the first sprouts emerge when planting a seed? Does that feeling of “First Movement” and “Seeking Light” translate to how you open a mix?

I’m going to defer to Tom on this one, as his fingers are definitely the greenest. He says, “it feels good — like a little success. It’s not always easy to get seeds going from scratch, so there’s a challenge to it, but when that first movement appears, it also feels like the beginning of a responsibility, in a good way”. That feeling translates into opening a mix too: that first movement is the moment you know something’s starting, and then it’s about nurturing it, giving it space to grow and seeking out the light as it builds.

Passiflora was dedicated to Keith McIvor, whose Tranquility Mixes were a stated influence. Was he on your mind while putting this one together too?

Keith has played a big part in how we came to release music as KiF Productions. He was really encouraging of Still Out, which meant a lot to us as we have huge respect for him and Optimo. His invitation to play at Watching Trees in 2025 also set us on the road to collaborating with Wil & Tia and Music to Watch Seeds Grow By.

The Tranquility Mixes are beautiful and were particularly timely for us, as Keith was sharing four hour-long mixes of calming music during lockdown in 2020. There’s also a direct link between those mixes and our Seeds Mix, as Keith’s Tranquility Mixes introduced us to the Japanese environmental ambient music duo Inoyama Land, who feature in the Dawn section. In terms of Passiflora, Sleepwalk: A Selection by Optimo (Espacio) from ’08 was another influence.

Keith was definitely on our minds while putting this mix together too. DJing a long Saturday morning into the afternoon at Bush of Ghosts at Watching Trees this year was another Keith-related factor — it was a magical moment in a beautiful setting, with an engaged audience, and it definitely became part of the inspiration for the Seeds Mix.

Do you use any specific frequencies or tonalities that resonate with the natural world or plant life?

Frequencies and tone played a very important role in Passiflora, and getting some of that feeling into the mix was important to us. Maybe not specific frequencies as such, but warmer tones certainly felt very apt. The mix contains found sounds from nature alongside more synthetic electronic frequencies, which is a juxtaposition we really dig.

What instruments or sounds do you use to evoke the feeling of nature and growth most effectively?

Wind instruments, drones, bells, environmental sounds, birdsong and insects always help evoke that feeling for us. We’ve also found ourselves drawn to tracks that have a natural swell or ebb to them, almost like slow breathing — something that gradually expands and contracts. There’s something about that quality that feels very connected to nature and growth. It’s an avenue that we’ll be continuing to explore as our obsession continues…

How does your music composition change for day versus night phases in a plant’s life cycle? — This feels directly relevant to a dawn-into-dusk mix — how does the sound itself shift as the light changes?

We’re drawn to the way sound changes with the light, so the day-to-night transition feels very natural to us. During the day there’s more movement, brightness and detail — things feel a little more open. As the light fades, we tend to gravitate towards darker, slower and more dreamlike sounds, with more room for things to breathe. There’s a gradual shift rather than a hard change, almost like the music selected is following the natural rhythm of the day.

How do environmental sounds like water, wind, or birdsong influence your compositions?

It’s often one of the first things we look for when we’re building a track. Environmental sounds in particular can become a foundation for a piece. Birdsong can become a melodic element or even a riff, and we’ll often use birdsong that’s specific to the location we have in mind.

On a recent visit to Cornwall, we hooked up with our Verdant / Brewing Folk / Stone Club crew, who took us out to Zennor to see the megalithic stones. That trip informed a remix we’re doing for Matthew Shaw from Stone Club, where we used Choughs and Short-eared Owls, both native to Cornwall. Tom has a good knowledge of birds and we both have long-standing connections with Slimbridge WWT, so birdsong has become a bit of an obsession for us.

We also like throwing in fake, synth(etic) bird sounds from time to time, just to keep things interesting and mess with the spotters.

Do you consider the emotional connection humans have with nature when creating music?

Absolutely. Everything we’ve made so far has been about the idea of ‘creating spaces’ that allow anyone listening to step back from our tech-heavy, information-overloaded, fast-paced world, slow down and be in the moment. That’s something we’re continually trying to respond to through what we create, and it felt particularly relevant to this mix. If the music can provide a little space to breathe, switch off and simply be for a while, then that’s a really important part of what we’re trying to do.

If you were a plant what would you be and why?

This took a while for us to agree on, but Tom’s initial suggestion of a coppiced hazel tree in a Holloway won out. It symbolises longevity and practicality, and has a good symbiotic relationship with humans. And residing in a Holloway, just think of all those leaves dropping over the centuries — plenty of samples!

We’ve got a bit of a thing for ancient woodland, so it felt like a pretty good fit for us.

Got any growing tips? — for parks, common land and forests specifically, rather than a garden.

Think in three dimensions, and think long term — beyond one or two generations. Planting shouldn’t just be about what looks good now, but about creating a holistic ecosystem with biodiversity at the fore. Different heights, layers and species can create habitats for all sorts of life, and the best planting should be allowed to evolve over time.

Will’s Uncle Marko used to plant weed on common land around the outside perimeter of Toronto Airport, which certainly gets you thinking about the possibilities of guerrilla gardening and what we consider to be ‘public’ space!

Check out the Seeds release here

Instagram

Tracklist:
(Dawn)
The Habbiyya – Two Shakuhachis
Iasos – Undulating Bell Harmonics
Harold Budd – It’s Steeper Near The Roses (For David Sylvian)
Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo
Laaraji – Essence (Excerpt)
Inoyami Land – Bananatron
Spacetime Continuum – Ping Pong
MDA Analog – Rainful Memories
Hatchback – And The Walls Became The World Around Us
M&M – Garden In The Sky
Dieter – Ecstasy
Roedelius – Tempera

(Dusk)
Bruce Haack – 17 Gifts For Free Children
Deux Filles – Birds
Old Jared – IV. Forest Pond
Priscilla Ermel – Gestos De Equilibrio (Excerpt)
Another Fine Day – Life Before Land
Paz Sounds – Trees & Birds
Hampshire & Foat – Lullaby
Jonny Nash – Smoke Rings
Green-House – Soft Coral
The Black Dog – Chesh
Ashra – Deep Distance
Underworld – To Heal
Virginia Astley – Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed
Orchestra Of The Swan – An Ending (Ascent)[Arr. For Violin, Harp & Orchestra by David Le Page]
Brian Eno – Strange Quiet

Patricia Wolf’s Yarrow, is the ninth edition in our Seeds series. It grew out of weeks spent at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, working alongside the ecologists studying plants, pollinators, and a warming climate.

One of those ecologists was Dr Paul CaraDonna - and the album’s closing track, ‘Ecosystem Meditation’ came directly out of that collaboration:

This was an invitation to imagine what it could be like for us to be rooted to one spot, fed only by sun and rain, dependent on other creatures to move at all.

CaraDonna spends his working life asking that same question in the field - at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Northwestern University, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, tracking the interactions between plants and pollinators across the Colorado Rockies, Arizona’s Sky Islands, and the gardens of Chicago itself. Alongside the fieldwork, he runs the Total Ecology Research Studio Lab and founded the Art-Science Exchange Project, both built on the same conviction: that science and art asking questions together get further than either does alone.

For Seeds, he’s put together eight tracks that move the way his research does, from the vastness of interconnection down into a single flower, an orchard, a rainbow with birth on one end and death on the other.

1. Suryummy - “Polynators.”
   Like blasting off to outer space…atmospheric and out of this world…but here we are, right here on Planet Earth. When we engage with world around us, we realize we are embedded in a vast network of interaction—human, non-human; plant, animal, microbe; geological, ecological, chemical; everything. So much to observe, explore, take in, be part of.

2. Coral Morphologic & Nick León - “Hearts Aflutter.”
   Where are we now? As the journey continues, as we notice our surroundings, we begin to see what really is right in front of us. Our “hearts aflutter”. The edges of our being slowly dissolve into everything else. If we lay in a meadow, breathing in the air…where do we begin and end? Where does everything else begin and end?

3. J. Foerster & N. Kramer - “Air Flows.”
   So simple, so calm. When I conduct my ecological research with plants, this is what I hope it sounds and feels like. An exchange. A conversation. A relationship.

4. Patricia Wolf - “Malheur Wildlife Refuge: Late Spring.”
   When we pause and observe, it is amazing what we might discover. The more you listen, the more you see.

5. Loris S. Sarid - “Quasi Red.”
   Let it inspire, empower, and motivate.

6. Botany - “Ory (Joyous Toil).”
   Now what? We’re just trying to figure it out. It is at once amazing and overwhelming. Beautiful and terrifying. Terror/Sublime.

7. Patricia Wolf - “Sessile Existence.”
   Imagine that you are a plant. What would that be like? You are stuck in the ground. You are sustained by the sun and the rain from the clouds. And you might rely on other organisms to reproduce and move around. The world is green—so much of the life on earth lives this way. What would that be like? (This song is inspired in part by working together on plant ecology projects in the Rocky Mountains.)

8. George Clanton & Hatchie - “For You, I Will.”
   A Rainbow: on one end there is birth and on the other end there is death. That’s life. It is whatever you want it to be. Beginning/End.

Check out Dr Paul CaraDonna’s work here - amazing website btw Paul ;)

Listen to Yarrow below. Last few cassettes here

Our first foray into the world of physical merch, tees and caps.

Designed by the beautiful mind of dr.me.

👕👕👕 Tees 👕👕👕

Screen printed on Stanley Stella Freestyler. Relaxed, heavy, 100% organic open-end cotton. Very comfortable!

240gsm relaxed heavy fit. Set-in sleeve. 1×1 rib at neck collar. Inside back neck tape in self-fabric. Wide double-needle topstitch at sleeve and bottom hem.

Runs large; when in doubt, size up.

Wash at 30° gentle. No bleach. No tumble dry. Iron at 110° max.

Dom wears an XL in Green/Khaki

Wil wears an XXL in white,

🧢🧢🧢 Caps 🧢🧢🧢

Washed Green cap - one-size-fits-most!

Photography at Watching Trees by Hannah Kurr and Angie Towse

Head over to our Bandcamp to order, we’ll be shipping out late July.

🌱🌱🌱

‘

Ten editions in, four into Season Two, and we’re doing what any sensible plant does at a milestone: nothing dramatic - no fireworks, just another ring on the trunk. That’s not to say it’s not an equally beautiful aural offering to grow along to.

What better way to mark it with the work conceived, collected and collaged by the most excellent KiF Productions, fresh from last year's triumphant debut Still Out.

Passiflora (Passifloraceae) is a genus of around 550 species of flowering plants, native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. The Passion Flower is the kind of plant that looks like it’s showing off - blooms so intricate, vines climbing with the patient, unbothered persistence of something that knows it has nowhere else to be. Used for centuries to treat anxiety and insomnia, it feels very apt as part of the Seeds family: a flower whose entire personality is to “calm down.”

Season Two has spent its life so far asking what it means to actually pay attention to a plant, rather than just walking past one and nodding. Passiflora raises the stakes: what does it mean to follow one the whole way through, instead of getting bored after the first bloom photo? True to its namesake, the record refuses to be rushed. It’s more interested in the unglamorous middle part - the part where things are quietly becoming something, long before anyone can see it.

KiF, on the process:

“We saw the passionflower as a cycle of growth - seed to flower to fruit and back again. Drawn to its dreamlike appearance and calming qualities, we explored how that sense of tranquillity and altered perception could be expressed through sound.”

“We imagined the passionflower’s journey through its habitat, history and seasonal transformations. Inspired by its symbolism and life cycle, we translated ideas of growth, attention and renewal into collaged and manipulated sound.”

“We wanted the sounds to evolve like a seed underground - forming in darkness before emerging into light. The music follows stages of growth, transformation and emergence.”

Like the plant that inspired it, Passiflora unfolds according to its own rhythm, inviting listeners into a space shaped less by expectation than by duration and attention. It is a work concerned with process rather than resolution, offering an environment in which detail reveals itself gradually over time.

Out August 12th, 2026, on cassette and digital via our Bandcamp - the first preview is up now, for anyone who wants to peek at the roots before the flower opens.

“Passiflora is dedicated to the memory of Keith McIvor.” KiF productions

Patricia Wolf’s recent release on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By, Yarrow (the 9th edition in the series), emerged from weeks spent at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, working alongside ecologists studying plants, pollinators, and the slow pressures of a changing climate.

The album maps a Yarrow’s life from root to seed: the conditions needed to grow, the quiet underground, the moment a flower opens to something that might carry it further. Field recordings from those Colorado summers are woven through the compositions, leaving room, as Wolf puts it, for the natural sounds to come through – her way of sharing an emotional inner life when thinking about these environments.

For this mix, Wolf turned her attention to morning. Imagining this year’s Watching Trees festival crowd coming down from a long night of dancing – we talked her through in the afterglow of this year’s edition. Wolf built A Wander in the Garden for that specific threshold hour – somewhere between nine and ten, when birdsong starts to reassert itself and the body wants something slow, expansive, and unhurried.

The anchor track arrived first: the Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s Photosynthesis, from which everything else grew. What follows is a walk through an imaginary garden with several climates – shade beneath a linden tree, open meadow thick with yarrow and field poppy, a pine grove smelling of warm sap, an orchard of cherries and mulberries just beginning to ripen.

If she had to name the plant that holds this hour best, Wolf chooses lavender: something with a direct line to the nervous system, a quiet insistence on calm.

A Wander in the Garden feels like it was made for a specific time of day – that early morning threshold before the world fully wakes. What does that hour feel like to you, and what does the garden sound like then?
When I made this mix I was thinking about your Watching Trees festival and while I was unable to be there, I had fun with this mix pretending that I was in charge of the music in the morning when people would be waking up after a long night of dancing. With that in mind, the time might be somewhere between 9 and 10am, many hours after sunrise, but still early enough to feel like morning. The garden wouldn’t be silent then, but natural sounds would be more prominent. People in the garden would notice birdsong, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sound of animal footsteps and calls.

You imagined an audience just coming down from a night of dancing. How does that change what you reach for musically? Is there a particular plant or part of the garden that holds that same quality of gentle landing?
After a night of physical exertion and heavy mental stimulation it is nice to listen to something more calm, slow, and expansive. If I had to choose a plant in my imaginary garden to pair with this relaxing experience, I’d choose lavender. It has a powerful calming effect on the nervous system.

Was there a specific moment on the walk – a particular turning, or a sound — that the mix grew out of?
I was listening to the Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s new album and when I heard their track “Photosynthesis” I knew that I had to use that one for this mix. From that track the mix grew and grew.

If the garden at that hour had a temperature, a colour, a smell – what would they be?
This garden would be quite large and would have a few different microclimates to allow for many species of plants to grow. Since this is a wander through the garden, I imagined the garden to be a dynamic one .The area beneath the old linden tree would be fragrant with its blossoms. It would also be cool and dark in the shade. Then, in an open meadow, there would be a large variety of native wildflowers with bumblebees, butterflies, and honey bees flying from flower to flower. That area would be a bit warmer since it’s exposed to the direct sun. It would be a multicoloured space with Yarrow, Everlasting-Pea, Wild Chamomile, Cleavers, Columbine, Creeping Thistle, Field Poppy, and many other flowering plants. When the wander takes you to the pine grove, the warm smell of sap can be detected. A bit further on is an orchard with cherries, apricots, apples, plums, figs, mulberries, and pears. The mulberries and cherries are fragrant and ripening. You can smell their fruit and take some to eat.

Birds and plants share the same early morning – birdsong is often the first sign that something is growing, moving, returning. How do you hear birds in relation to the garden? Do they feel like part of it, or visitors to it?
I have a strong belief that all life on this planet is interdependent and entwined. Birds rely on plants in many ways; sometimes for food, sometimes for nesting, sometimes as a place to hide. In turn, many plants rely on birds for seed dispersal. Did you know that a seed that has passed through the digestive system of a bird or animal has a significantly higher chance of germinating? Resident bird species will likely use the garden year-round, but migratory birds will only use the garden as a temporary stop as they travel to their intended destination.

What’s the first plant you notice when you step outside in the morning, and does it ever find its way into what you make?
Imagine that I am at this festival, and the first plants that I notice are the old, strong oaks. I like to think of the entire ecosystems when working on music inspired by nature. In that way, oaks have found their way into my work.

Seeds need darkness before they need light. Do you think music made for early morning carries something of that same in-between quality – not quite night, not yet day?
I think that music and art made on the cusp of something should carry a bit of all that it encompasses. The transition from night to day is a mutable time and should transform gradually.

How do environmental sounds – birdsong, wind through leaves, the first insects – find their way into what you make?
I do field recording and am very attracted to listening to the natural world. I like to release the field recordings without music, but sometimes I get a strong feeling when I am on a particular excursion or while listening back to the recordings and feel inspired to compose music to it. I like to play with the bits of empty space in the recording and leave room for the natural sounds to come through. It’s my way of sharing my thoughts and emotional inner life when I am thinking about these environments.

Check out her Seeds release here

Soundcloud

Instagram

Tracklist:

The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – Photosynthesis
}Andrew Pekler – Waterway Rhythm
Andy Aquarius – Under Der Linden
Slowfoam – Divine Morpho, Shimmering (feat. RAN PARK)
Luke Wyland – Pollinators
Bonnie Prince Billy – Willow, Pine and Oak
Saloli – Butterfly
John Carroll Kirby – Messages in Water
Maxime Denuc – Papillons
Graintable – Rain in the Trees
Phil Geraldi – Chorus in Green
Green-House – Under the Oak
Yu Su – Ripe Fruits
Olof Dreijer – Fern Valley

Watching something small grow in your kitchen makes you pay close attention. The Seoul-based duo Salamanda and the next artist stepping up for Seeds understand this. Uman (Sala) and Yejin (Manda) spent a day watching a single basil plant on a windowsill, noticing how the light shifted across its leaves, water gathered at its roots, and time slipped by. What started as a simple observation turned into a meditation on the inner life of a plant and what it means to really listen to something living.

Basil droops in the cold, grows too fast in the heat, and can wilt from too much attention; it needs a moment, too. Salamanda noticed that this silence is a pause for space, where the real growth happens. For them, music fills that space…

Manda talks about understanding her own feelings by looking at her plants. When she feels down, the plants seem to react. They reflect something back: being present, paying attention, and giving and receiving care. This mix comes from that kind of language, asking you to keep coming back to care for the same small plant. If basil could think, what would it think of you?

Get your headphones on. Listen to the way a plant listens to light…

Who are you, and why are you here?

We are Salamanda and we just recorded a mix for plants and for all the plant lovers.

Tell us about your basil. Where does it live, and how long have you been keeping it?

It’s been rooted and thriving inside our heads for a while now. As for the real ones, they’re in our fridges and in our bellies, restocked every once in a while.

A cradle suggests something being held, something tender and new. What does that word mean to you in the context of this mix?

We thought of the concept of “nurturing basil” and imagined a cradle where it is placed and taken good care of, receiving lots of TLC…

Basil is notoriously particular – it sulks in the cold, bolts in the heat, and wilts if you look at it wrong. Have you noticed any particular methods or tricks that help yours along?

Sala – I actually haven’t raised basil in real life, so honestly I have no idea…
Manda – If it starts to wilt, I just send it to my mom. Somehow, it always comes back alive again in no time.

What role does silence play in your music? And do you think basil needs quiet to thrive?

In fact, we believe that not only basil but everyone needs a moment of silence every once in a while. Silence can mean many things: alone time, a break, meditation, nighttime, etc. To allow for healthy growth, it’s always important to secure enough time for yourself to pause, reflect, and recharge before continuing. Silence gives us the momentum to move forward into what comes next in life, and we think the same goes for music. It offers a moment to savor what you’ve heard, and a sense of curiosity for what comes next.

How does your music shift between day and night? Basil follows the light so closely – did that shape anything about the mix you made?

We don’t think the music we make is greatly affected by the time of day we’re working on it. However, each of us always has a specific image in mind when making music. This applies to the tracks on our album and this mix as well. We hope you create your own imagined time and space when listening, too.

Basil is one of the few herbs that people name, talk to, and worry about. Do you think about the emotional relationship between humans and the plants they keep when you’re composing?

Sala – I don’t really think about it; however, I sometimes like to imagine that they’re quietly watching me work on tracks. They’re the only living creatures I live with, and I love being around them.

Manda – I don’t particularly think about my emotional relationship with plants while making music, but I often find myself reading my own condition through theirs. When my heart isn’t in a good place, strangely, the plants don’t seem to be doing well either. Plants require such attentive, consistent care, and when I don’t even have the capacity to tend to myself, I think I naturally become unable to offer that same energy to them.

Have you ever tended to plants with music playing? This is how Music To Watch Seeds Grow By came into being… if you have what happened?

Sala – I once read that, like animals, plants can sense a lot about their environment, and that they can distinguish between dangerous and non-dangerous stimuli. While they may not experience emotions like humans do, I like to believe I can communicate with them by providing a consistent routine. Whenever I get home from work, I:

1. say hi to them (as a signal that something good is about to happen);

2. gently place them on the table;

3. turn on some good music; and

4. switch on LED grow lights to supplement natural sunlight.

I know this might sound funny, but I like to believe that one day they might greet me in their own way when I come home, and feel the positive energy from the music as much as I do.

Manda – I have quite a few plants at home, and I’ve come to realize how much time passes while I’m cleaning the glass vases for my hydro plants, changing the water, rinsing their roots, and misting their leaves. Since then, I’ve started playing music that suits my mood that day while doing these small acts of care. If I had a big party the night before and drank too much, I tend to choose music with extremely low entropy. Sometimes I wish plants had a button that allowed them to select the music themselves. I feel a little sorry that I’m always the one choosing for them—sorry, guys.

Environmental sounds – water, wind, the tick of a radiator, a window left open – how do these find their way into what you make?

We used to love using environmental sound samples as they are in our work, but these days we prefer to use them more subtly or in highly processed forms. We believe that any sound can be a great instrument.

How important is minimalism to you when making music for something as slow and interior as growth?

Just because plants grow slowly and gently, we don’t think the music necessarily needs to reflect that. Nevertheless, we believe it’s a nice genre that can effectively portray their growth and possibly help prevent excessive stimuli and stress.

When’s the last time you bought a plant or seeds, and what was it?

Sala – After moving into a new home last year, I bought two plants to keep me company: a Grevillea seedling and a Variegated Jasmine.

Manda – A water-grown plant my mom gave me is growing like a monster. It has round, light green leaves, and there are so many of them.
I don’t know its name. It’s grown so much that it’s taking up three vases now. It’s honestly a little scary.

How do you feel when you see the first sprouts?

Very delightful! As much as we love baby animals, we also love baby plants, born from the ground. They’re so precious.

If you were a plant, what would you be – and why?

Sala – Probably a cactus. I’m really poor at keeping myself hydrated, yet I’m still doing well somehow.

Manda – I wish I could grow into a huge tree, tall enough to watch people moving around from high above and to become a shelter for animals.
But what if I grow so big that people think I’m in the way and decide to cut me down?
That thought suddenly makes me a little worried.

Congrats, you’ve won the plant lottery. Anything you want. What is it?

Sala – If I also won the regular lottery, I would buy a beautiful cottage with a garden where I would plant a big, beautiful willow tree.

Manda – I would get one box of very fresh cherry tomatoes delivered every week. I really, really love tomatoes. <3 <3

Check out the Seeds release here – just a few cassettes with Basil seeds left!

Soundcloud

Instagram

Tracklist:
C.Debussy – Piano Trio In G Minor, L 3 – 2. Scherzo
Oval – Cross Selling
Salamanda – introduce my atom which is my favorite one
Badlands – My Time Will Come Again
Bon Iver – 29 #Strafford APTS
Maxine Funke – Lucky Penny
Ora Clementi – Paradigm and Places
Salamanda – Kali
Voyage Futur – blending in
Tulips – Rubin
Salamanda – hungry snail
Salamanda – the blue wine
Lia Kohl – Car Horns (feat. Patrick Shiroishi)
Salamanda – Melting Hazard
Carl Stone & Asuna – A Salsa Nocturne
Jason Kolàr – 〒154-0011
Componium Ensemble – Automata (for celesta, glockenspiel and spring-tank guitar)
Salamanda – Full of Mushrooms
Salamanda – La Fille Aux Yeuh De Lin
Ben Lumsdaine – Renormalizer
Nueen – Structure of Desire
Pinkcourtesyphone – to be expected

Sometimes, the most important books find you when you’re not looking. I came to Pauline Oliveros the old-fashioned way. After work, in Carin and Teamy’s office, I was winding down, not searching for anything. A small blue book on the desk caught my eye: Quantum Listening. Its simplicity - cover, title, and size - drew me in. I picked it up, read a few pages, and didn’t put it down for a while.

Note the strategically placed bookmark: it’s from a first pass at the new Seeds covers, and it marked my place as I read.

The book came from Well Read, a curated space in Lisbon. There, someone decides what matters and arranges books where you might stumble across them. Although I’d picked up ‘Quantum Listening’ elsewhere, the feeling of that kind of serendipitous discovery is unique to physical spaces like Well Read and why we still need them so much. Certain discoveries only happen that way. No method would have led me there. No recommendation engine has the patience for a small blue book sitting quietly on a desk at the end of the day. Now that I know more about her, I think Oliveros would have appreciated this: real listening, like real reading, needs a space slow enough to receive it.

That evening, once home, I shifted almost without noticing from the accidental find of the book to a different kind of search - this time via algorithms. Intrigued by what I’d read, I began following a thread I hadn’t pulled before. My curiosity led me to ‘Deep Listening’ - the cistern recordings, the drone pieces. Suddenly, I realised this whole world had been humming quietly, waiting below the surface for me to find it.

Photography: Centrum Foundation

The recording is called Deep Listening. It was made on October 8, 1988, at the bottom of a disused military water cistern in Fort Worden, Washington State. This concrete cylinder was built in 1907. It is 186 feet in diameter and 14 feet underground. It was designed to hold two million gallons of water and withstand bombing. Oliveros and two collaborators—trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis - climbed down a ladder through a small manhole. They began to play. No audience. No setlist. Just the three of them, their instruments, and a space with a reverberation time of 45 seconds. (Deep Listening Band, 2026)

Forty-five seconds. Every note played remained in the air for almost a minute before fading. The cistern was more than a venue; it was, in essence, the instrument.

What they were doing, Oliveros later said, was “learning to play the space itself.”

It's a sensibility that others were finding their way toward independently. In 2000, a Montreal artist duo called [The User] - Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan - turned Silo #5, an abandoned grain elevator in the city's Old Port, into something similar: a communal instrument, open to anyone. They wired it with microphones and speakers, gave it a phone number (+1 514 844 5555), and let the world play it. The structure had a reverberation time of over twenty seconds - the building doing to sound what the cistern did, but from a call box. Hundreds of thousands of people dialled in. (Thanks to Teamy for flagging this after reading this piece for me. Note to self OUT LOUD, research an extended piece on acoustic spaces as instruments)

“Can you imagine listening so intently that the room itself becomes a collaborator? Sometimes I wonder how often we let our surroundings shape what we hear, or if we mostly tune them out.”

The album is 63 minutes of accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, voice, conch shells, and garden hose. Long tones dissolve. Sounds blur where one ends, and another begins - like moving through a dream. Listening feels as if wading into warm, deep water in the dark. I sat with it for an hour and emerged as if I’d slept. That effect - the weird feeling of resurfacing from a dream - was, I soon learned, not a coincidence but an intended part of the experience. Learning this deepened my understanding of what I was hearing.

Who was she? Pauline Oliveros was a Tejana composer, accordionist, and philosopher. She grew up in Houston, bewitched by cicadas and neighbourhood frogs. She co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Centre in the 1960s…

She spent the rest of her life - she died in 2016 at 84 - building Deep Listening. In later years, she shared that life with IONE, a sound artist and poet. Together, they created music theatre and dream research projects. Oliveros’s work wasn’t just about thinking; it rested on the idea that listening or ‘hearing’ happens involuntarily. The ear picks up sounds automatically. Listening is choosing to notice what’s already present.

Deep Listening was her way of bringing out this in-between state, making listening last so long that it was almost like being held in a waking dream - a way to stay open to both what you notice and what is just below the surface.

What Oliveros encouraged - in the cistern, steady accordion pieces, and Sonic Meditations with a women’s group in the early 1970s - was likely a brain state dominated by alpha waves: “relaxed alertness” or “flow,” marked by calm, thoughtful activity. Alpha waves move 8 to 13 times per second—a mental twilight, softer awareness, an open mind, between wake and sleep. Below alpha is theta (4 to 8 times per second)—the realm of dreams, gut instincts, drifting before sleep, moments when morning images linger. Theta dominates during REM sleep. Research on remembering dreams finds '“frontal theta activity directly governs whether we can bring those nocturnal experiences back on waking.’” The dreaming brain uses the same tools for dreams and for deep creative thought.

Oliveros, without using brain scans, taught people to notice that state while awake. Long, steady sounds guide the mind - they keep a steady pace, leading it through alpha waves and toward something slower and deeper.

A note on the 70s, quickly, because it’s an era that has been misread. The New Age movement flourished around Oliveros’s early work. It notoriously extracted contemplative practices from their Indigenous and Eastern origins, flattening them into commodified wellness aesthetics: crystals, chakras, brainwave cassette tapes sold in health food stores. It’s a residue that still contaminates any conversation that brings up the words “vibration” and “consciousness” in the same breath.

Oliveros went the other way. She created Sonic Meditations with a feminist group after months of experimentation - both political and musical.

She worked with physicist Lester Ingber on how people pay attention when listening. She developed new methods: drone music, underground cisterns, and hearing research. She didn’t borrow spiritual ideas she hadn’t earned; she built her own from basic concepts and real experience. The term ‘meditation’ hides what she truly did - her work was more unusual and precise than that word suggests.

Later in her life, Oliveros went further. In her 1999 essay - republished as the slim manifesto ‘Quantum Listening’, with a foreword by Laurie Anderson - she pushed the idea into stranger territory. for decades - both central figures in American experimental music, both working at the crossroads of technology, performance, and consciousness, both sharing a conviction that listening was something Western culture had systematically undervalued.

They performed together, improvising live to a screening of a silent film at EMPAC in 2013. Oliveros was on accordion, Anderson on electric violin. They also appeared together in the 1993 documentary The Sensual Nature of Sound, a portrait of four women who had quietly remade the terrain of American music. (The Films of Laurie Anderson, 2013)

When a later documentary about Oliveros’s life was released, Anderson contributed a single-word review: Luminous.

Oliveros, in Quantum Listening, says that we have become a society that mostly pays attention to what we see. Hearing is treated as something extra. Her best example is NASA. In 1998, they sent a $165 million Mars probe with a $15 microphone from a hearing aid, almost as an afterthought. The sounds of another world: an extra. This is even more striking when you know that Anderson later became NASA’s first artist-in-residence. She was not a scientist or an engineer. She was an artist. The agency that didn’t think to listen to Mars brought in the woman who spent thirty years listening to everything else.

‘Quantum Listening’, she wrote, is “listening to more than one reality at once, in as many ways as possible. “Changing, and being changed by, the act of listening itself - hearing microscopic detail and the entire field simultaneously.

Her main point: hearing is sidelined in modern life. We are, she says, “a visually oriented society.” The ear tells the eye where to look, but the eye dominates. Research on machine vision advances faster than on hearing. We bring cameras to the zoo, not recorders. Zoos aren’t even open at the best times for sound - early mornings and evenings, when animals are loudest. The birds on my Lisbon terrace, as the weather improves, prove this point.

She says ignoring hearing isn’t harmless. Not listening leads to isolation. She asks, ‘What if you could hear colours? What if we launched a satellite microphone to listen to space?’ An electron microscope lets us see tiny structures. But we could also listen to the micro world and reveal a universe shaped by quantum physics.

Oliveros saw a comparison. What we notice through listening is not set or just waiting for us. It is partly defined by how we listen and pay attention. What we hear depends on how we listen. Which is a very unusual idea: “The quantum listener listens to listening.”

Listening to listening. Not just paying attention to the world, but turning back to notice how you are paying attention. You become aware that you are aware, watching your mind at work. It’s like a feedback loop for your mind. The brain gets quiet enough to notice what it is doing, letting you watch yourself think.

Then there’s the Tuning Meditation.

Written in 1971 and later expanded into The World Wide Tuning Meditation (2007), the instructions are almost absurdly simple. Take a deep breath and let it all the way out with a sound. Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone - internally, amid the silence. On your next breath, using any vowel sound, sing the note you silently perceived. Then listen to the whole field of sound the group is making. Find a voice distant from you and tune to it as exactly as you can. Then contribute a new tone - one that nobody else is singing.

Oliveros performed a version at St John’s Smith Square in London in June 2016, just after the Brexit result, and the feeling of community that flowed through the room as the audience sang together was described as genuinely palpable. When the piece was revived as a global Zoom event in the early weeks of lockdown in spring 2020, it reached over 4,600 participants from all seven continents and more than 30 countries. (Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, n.d.) Thousands of people, alone in their homes, breathing and listening together, singing tones they’d imagined internally, tuning to strangers they couldn’t see, building a shifting chord-mass from nothing but breath and attention.

It is, in the most direct sense, a network spanning many people. A living system composed of individuals paying close attention to one another. Which brings us, finally and not by accident, to plants.

It turns out that plants are electrically active in ways that are surprisingly similar to the sound worlds Oliveros explored. They don’t have nervous systems like animals, but they constantly send and receive tiny electrical signals - small currents through their cells, changes in voltage that let them sense and respond to their environment. These signals occur at frequencies very close to the alpha and theta ranges, where the human mind is most open.

Some researchers have started turning these tiny electrical signals to sound through a process called biosonification (Brian d’Souza, we’re looking at you): wires on leaves pick up small electrical changes - caused by photosynthesis, water moving, and reactions to light and touch - and turn them into digital data that becomes music. The result is slow, calm, always changing, and never exactly the same. Oliveros, in Quantum Listening, imagined this exact idea: that we could listen to the tiny world through instruments, the way we already see it through powerful microscopes—and, by doing so, find a strange universe that cameras could never show us.

Plants also react to sound, and not by accident. Roots grow toward the vibration of running water, even when there is no water, finding their way by sound instead of by what they touch.

‘Plant roots were able to detect sounds and also to grow towards the source of the sound.’
Prof. Stefano Mancuso, researcher,

Flowers make sweeter nectar within minutes of hearing the low buzz of bee wings. Plants that feel the vibrations of caterpillars eating start chemical defences they do not use against wind or birdsong - which means they are not just reacting to any noise, but telling different sounds apart with great accuracy. The world below what humans usually notice is full of activity. Some of the most important communication in nature happens at sound levels most of us have learned to ignore.

Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere - a history of city gardening recently featured by Caught by the River, whose festival at Elmley we’re proud to be part of this May—makes a similar point in a different way: a plant is not simply an object, not just decoration, but something that naturally connects things. Gardens, wherever they are and whatever they look like, tend to create what she calls “communities that are biological as well as social”—a rich mix of connections that help people get by. The communities that form around growing things are, she finds again and again in different times and places, some of the strongest we have. Which is, when you think about it, exactly what a forest already knows.

Then think again about the Tuning Meditation - all those voices distributed across a network, each one listening carefully, each one contributing a tone that nobody else is singing. It starts to seem less like a metaphor and more like a description of what a garden is already doing, continuously, whether we’re attending to it or not.

Oliveros understood this, even without the research.

Her cistern recordings sent sound back into the ground - to stone, soil, and packed earth, the world of roots and fungi. She talked about listening with the whole body, through the feet as much as through the ears. “Sometimes I try this when I’m walking: How much of the world can I hear if I let my attention sink down, out of my head, into my body?”

Through practice, she was reaching for a way of paying attention that took less and gave more, involved less ranking things, and was more about being part of nature. Not the position of someone looking down at what they study, but letting that difference disappear completely.

Maybe that’s the point: to stop being a spectator and become part of the field itself.

It’s a way of being that the environmental health researcher Yoshifumi Miyazaki has spent decades trying to measure. His work on shinrin-yoku - forest bathing, the Japanese practice of walking slowly through the woods without rushing - has found that spending time among trees causes real changes in the body that Oliveros’s practice also aims for. Stress hormones go down. Blood pressure drops. Heart rate becomes steady. And brain activity moves toward the alpha range - that same relaxed, open state that long, steady sounds help create from the inside. Miyazaki’s main point is simple and a bit surprising: our bodies still know that nature is home. Not solely as a symbol. Physically. The nervous system knows where it is and reacts accordingly.

What Oliveros was doing in the cistern - going down into the earth, letting such echoes blend single notes into something flowing and alive - was, in its own way, like forest bathing for the ears. A return to the ground. A reset. The slow, careful attention that both practices need is not merely a treat or an escape. It’s a way of being that the body, it seems, has been waiting for all along.

Inside Quantum Listening, she puts the stakes plainly: the devaluation of hearing through unconsciousness has caused a serious imbalance in the quality of life. Suppression of listening, she writes, leads to separation and alienation. We need, she says, to be “listening in all possible modes to meet the challenges of the unknown - the unexpected.” Feels like, in 2026, just like a line written for now.

What she offers - as brain scientists study how dreams are stored by theta waves, as bio-sonification artists let birch trees and ferns make music, as plant scientists find that roots find their way by vibration—is less a method and more a way of being. It is a willingness to slow down enough to notice what is already being sent out.

The alpha state is not a retreat from the world. It’s the frequency at which the world becomes audible.

The question, as always, is whether we’re paying close enough attention to hear it. 🌿

On that note - here’s something I stumbled across late at night, headphones on, the city gone quiet outside my window. Oliveros and Eno played at the same time… somehow it works amazingly well.

Start here: Pauline Oliveros — Deep Listening (1989), recorded in the Fort Worden cistern, Washington.

Then: Sonic Meditations (1971).

Read: Quantum Listening (first published 1999, republished 2022 by Ignota Books / Silver Press) 80 pages, worth every one.

The World Wide Tuning Meditation is still performed periodically through the Centre for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — anyone can participate, no musical experience required. Also: Yoshifumi Miyazaki — Walking in the Woods (2018) and Shinrin-Yoku (2018). Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere (Bodley Head, 2026), reviewed at Caught by the River. For the plant side of the music: seek out Mileece’s biosonification work, or Brian d’Souza’s Plants Can Dance project — electrodes on leaves, music that grows.

There’s a basil plant on a windowsill somewhere in Seoul. It doesn’t know I’m writing about it. It probably doesn’t know much of anything, at least not in a way we’d recognise as knowing. But Jimin Sung and Yejin Jang, the duo behind Salamanda, sat with it long enough - imagining its days, tracing its small ceremonies of light and warmth - that it became something else entirely. Well… it became an album that they entrusted to us.

Seeds 008 is the eighth edition (did you guess that already?) and the second release of ‘Season Two’, as we’ve been calling it. After Brian d’Souza (aka ) took us underground with the root negotiations of Sunflowers, Salamanda bring us back above the soil. A single basil plant. A full day.

A Day in the Plant’s Life

The album opens with ‘introduce my atom, which is my favourite one’, a title that sounds like a child’s declaration, or something an entity might say if it suddenly became aware of its own cellular existence. Morning light. A quiet announcement of presence. From there, ‘to to ki toki tok’ settles into something rhythmic and dripping: water falling, a clock ticking, the slow metabolic pulse of photosynthesis going about its work without any fuss.

Next, ‘allez, pousse!’ emerges as the album’s pivotal moment, capturing the push toward light. Anyone who’s moved a plant pot and watched it reorient overnight will recognise the idea. As the day continues, ‘hungry snail’ arrives: a slow, creaturely interruption on the glass, filled with longing and tenderness.

As afternoon deepens into ‘Basil’s Ritual,’ the warmth and devotion of the day repeat from root to leaf. Night then falls, signalled by ‘Basil’s Dream,’ which brings something like sleep. The album closes with ‘the blue wine,’ a final reverie that’s hard to describe but fitting - a closing reckoning.

Have a listen to that as we’re premiering it on here:

The Question Underneath

After the music, Sala imagines her plant gazing all day, receiving darkness, welcoming morning, and tilting toward tomorrow’s sun with what she calls “quiet sincerity.” This outlook is generous for something simply kept in a pot on a ledge.

Manda diverges slightly; Basil is a herb that, grown well (something I’ll admit I’ve never been very good at), ultimately finds its place in a salad, a sauce, or pressed between your fingers after it’s crushed.

Does the basil know that? she asks. Would it resist, accept, or perhaps feel something close to joy? “This music emerged from such small, trivial, and possibly useless imaginings,” she notes. That self-deprecation is part of what makes the thought worth sitting with.

“A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”

St. Basil the Great’s quote lands differently once you’ve spent thirty minutes inside a plant’s imagined interior life. The name alone, it turns out, is a thread worth pulling.

Written & Produced by Jimin Sung and Yejin Jang Artwork by Daniel Hermann Release Date: April 16, 2026

As with every Seeds release, the cassette edition comes with a packet of basil seeds. The most on-the-nose thing we’ve ever done, and entirely correct.

Pre-order Seeds 008 via Bandcamp

🌱👀

Best known for his hypnotic visual installations and art direction across DIY music spaces from Old Red Bus Station to Resonance, House found himself at last year’s Watching Trees festival doing something beautifully meta: filming daytime trees to project back onto their evening counterparts through a cascade of prisms.

The “arty bullshit” behind it, as he puts it, was about bridging gaps of time and space and memory – creating past tense ghosts of daylight. But really, “it just looked pretty, and the trees and sun had it all covered.”

Whilst setting up his spectral light show on the Bush of Ghosts stage, Tia and Wil (that’s us) caught wind of the music he was playing. What unfolded in those early morning hours was something special – patient, ambient-soundscapes with a deep understanding of the fractal nature of the forest, where every process is made up of countless sub-processes doing their best impression of one solid bit.

This mix captures that philosophy; energised yet gently held, pulsing yet ambient. Mirroring both the slow, steady rhythm of plant growth and the constant, quick reactions within the cells. There are rarely right angles in the forest, just lots of individual leaves doing their thing- a benevolent collusion with the kodama, those forest sprites that House channelled through his psychogeographic, hauntological light work.

From the Rhubarb Triangle of West Yorkshire, where he dabbles in ambient matters with his long time friend Aaron during hazy Sunday afternoon straggler zones, overlooking different vistas, House has created something that feels like plugging into the mainframe with beings deep in the woods, under a very full moon.

Always bring a memory stick, indeed.

Who are you?

You, probably ∞♡…

Musically though I’m just a product of a load of great communities, bands, parties and people I’ve been with, in and around. In no particular order… Duke, Comfort Peter, Fever, Endless City, Old Red, Resonance, NARR, HCE, Wizold Sage, Dima Rabik, Amateur Hour, Workshop, Map, Slop, LTJ, Phaedra, a Village Mind, Giggle + a few more that never got round to the naming process. Also any I’ve forgotten because it was too much fun. Long live DIY music in all forms, nooks and crannies.

Why are you here?

I was doing some special lighting for the Bush of Ghosts at Watching Trees which involved filming the daytime trees each day then projecting them back onto their evening counterparts through a load of prisms. The arty bullshit behind it is that it was trying to bridge the gaps of time and space and memory, creating past tense ghosts of the daylight. Using the projector as the one light source, the prisms split the beam into thousands of tiny rainbows all containing it’s own unique hue and personality alongside the essence of the original whole. It was inspired by the whole psychogeographic cut up tape drift animism forest sprite faerie kodama hauntological kinda thing but it also just looks pretty and I didn’t realy have to do much cus the trees and the sun have it all covered.

As I spent so much time messing with the projectors on the stage I was playing some music during setup and Tia and Wil enjoyed it, so here I am 🙂 I have dabbled in ambient matters with my mate Aaron (A far better gardener and DJ than me) for a looooooong time now, so it has been real nice to share this with a wider audience outside the usual sunday afternoon hazy straggler zones overooking different vistas of west yorkshire. Always bring a memory stick!

When are you happiest?

I’m trying to be happiest right now but yesterday I found that quite hard and who knows about tomorrow. I do really love plugging into the mainframe and being with beings deep in the woods under a full moon though. Maybe even with some tunes on.

Are there specific genres or styles of music that you feel naturally complement the act of planting seeds?

Planting seeds is great but it takes a certain amount of energy and foresight to plant seeds right now that you might never even see fully grown in your lifetime. I like to feel energised and gently held by benevolent tunes with a pulse and not too many sudden movements. I feel like planting seeds is one of the biggest movements you can do to reclaim your physical, mental and emotional space from the machine, so lyrics and samples that encourage thought about this process always compliment it nicely.

How important is minimalism in music designed for slow, organic processes like plant growth?

I feel like minimalism has its place but the natural world can actually be pretty maximal most of the time. It’s just our new world has so much noise we now see that natural chaos as calming. Every process is made up of countless sub-processes, self replicating patterns and individual parts doing an impression of one solid bit. The fractal nature of this is something I like to play with and bring out in music – what is fast and what is slow? What is ambient? It’s totally subjective but I love music which somehow manages to pack itself with energy but still remain relaxed and ambient – that’s very seedish. There’s rarely a right angle in the forest, but you’ll find a hell of a lot of them in the topiary and landscaping of royal gardens. That’s a nice tree, but it would be a lot nicer if it was a cube. Once you zoom in there’s no right angles though, just a load of individual leaves doing their thing doing their best impression of one.

How do you approach creating music that mirrors the slow, steady rhythm of plant growth?

I love music that manages to mirror this on all levels, some elements showing the slow steady rhythm and some parts mirroring the constant quick reactions and interactions within the cells of the plant. I think we project speed onto the plant from our own perspective when comparing it to the speed at which our lives unfold, but I love to think about how time perception can vary from species to species.

What role does silence or pauses play in evoking the growth process in your music?

I love to walk as many places as I can and whenever I walk I enforce a strict no-music rule, apart from in emergencies of course. This silence brings an opportunity to do some deeper listening to things like the wind in the trees and the birds doing their thing and the dual carriageway in the distance. These are all very helpful things and can be fed back into the cycle of creation nicely.

What instruments or sounds to you evoke the feeling of nature and growth most effectively?

Acoustic instruments which require a human to function feel the most natural and fitting for the garden to me. It’s great what we’ve done with synths and electronics in the last 70 years or so, but that’s so new compared to the entire history of nature and humans. I reckon some of the older plants might be a bit confused about kick drums and what they are doing on the turf. We’re all going to have to find a symbiotic relationship though – everybody loves a kick drum sometimes. I like to imagine how many of them I’ve heard in my life and how different it all is now to when you heard the first one.

What did you grow in your garden this year?

I’m from the Rhubarb Triangle which is almost as exciting as the Bermuda or Wold Newton Triangle. Wakefield is the rhubarb capital of the world, so it would be rude not to grow a bit even if it’s just for bragging rights and crumbles. The trick to good rhubarb is forcing it to grow earlier than it would naturally, keeping it in total darkness, making it constantly reach for a light it is unlikely to find. It’s not too kind to the rhubarb but that’s the truth, it’s not nice but it makes the taste way better for us bigger and more advanced beings doing the harvesting.

What do you find most challenging about caring for new plants?

I’m actually naturally terrible at caring for plants. I’m trying my best and I really love them but I really do struggle with almost every aspect of it. Plants are the chaos which requires the order of the seasons and surrounding environment to flourish. My current life contains a chaos to order ratio that can be no good for the plants if I’m honest. Maybe when life changes I can be trusted to look after some in my own space. For now I visit them at their own homes and it works well for both of us, I think or hope there’s mutual respect. A cornus is not just for christmas.

Have you ever used music or other sensory experiences while tending to your plants?A few of us are working at the moment to create a sensory garden, arranged in separate areas for feel, smell, taste, sight and sound and with the grey areas between the categories seeping into each other’s spaces. There were a lot of different plants, lights and sounds of all descriptions – not one of them will have the power to overwhelm the senses or create a negative experience for any of the other plants or for the people loitering in the flowerbeds. All of them will be a treat for at least one of the senses. Nature is such a holistically sensory experience, I love the idea that gardens are kind of like playlists of curated moments.

Check out Jamie’s portfolio: https://www.hamiejouse.co.uk/art

Soundcloud: https://www.soundcloud.com/hamie_23

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamie_jouse

Ironic Hill – Chorus

Kuzich – Morning Sun
John Haycock ft Rob Dunford – Dapple Shade
Palta – Tabt optagelse
ssssoftpatch – Bowling for Loops
Agron – Should I feel bad for doing This
Wizold Sage – Comfort Heater

Christian Kleine – Beyond Repair (Version)
Golden Bug & In Fields – Blind
Ex-Terrestrial – Everybody Dreams
Takao – Bird Ensemble
David Versace – Heart to Heart
Barker – Fluid Mechanics
Shhhhh – Pond Natter
420 aka Galcher Lustwerk – Untitled 6
Motoko & Myers – Plover
Zammuto – It Can Feel So Good

Helianthus annuus - the common sunflower - is perhaps the most immediately joyful plant in any garden, for me anyway… and a friend of ours, Brian, aka Auntie - but we’ll get into that later.

For now, sow those seeds 2cm deep and 30cm apart between March and May, place them in bright direct sunlight, and within weeks, something remarkable begins to happen.

Stats fans: The British record for the tallest sunflower stands at just under 8m - an ambitious column reaching toward the sky… legends.

The real story of the sunflower isn’t what happens above the soil; it is most definitely beneath it.

But first, what we see is THAT FACE. That enormous, vivid disc - butter yellow, amber, rust - which most people mistake for a single flower. It isn’t. A sunflower head is an inflorescence: a community of up to 2,000 individual florets arranged in an extraordinary mathematical spiral. The outer ray florets, the ones we recognise as petals, are sterile; purely for display. The inner disc florets are the workers; each produces pollen and can set seed. The face of a sunflower is not a single thing, but many ‘things’ acting together, as one. A whole society, you could argue.

That spiral follows the Fibonacci sequence - the same pattern that’s found in pinecones, nautilus shells, pomegranate seeds and the pineal gland (a pinecone-shaped endocrine organ in the brain’s centre that regulates sleep cycles) and much more in nature. The more I’ve looked throughout my life, the more and more I’ve seen it. Nature returning to that reliable architecture: the one that packs the most into the least space, wastes nothing, shares the load evenly. Before you’ve even got to the roots, the sunflower is already making a case for collective efficiency over individual glory. If only life imitated this, hey!

There’s a useful parallel here that made when we spoke to him for Seeds Mix #9 - talking about the fractal nature of the forest, how “every process is made up of countless sub-processes, self-replicating patterns and individual parts doing an impression of one solid bit.” A sunflower head is exactly that: thousands of florets doing their best impression of one enormous flower.

Zoom in and this unity dissolves, zoom out, and it’s seamless.

“Fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.” Sheldrake again, sorry I should have been more adventurous with my research, but his ideas are just too apt.

Sunflowers are not the solitary giants they appear. They are social creatures, woven into a quiet web of negotiation, cooperation, and communication that scientists are still only beginning to map. When two neighbouring sunflowers encounter a patch of nutrient-rich soil between them, they don’t rush to claim it. Instead, they deliberately root elsewhere - yielding, deferring, coexisting. For a species that can grow the height of a house, this is an amazing act of restraint. It suggests that coexistence can be a stronger evolutionary drive than the dominance we see all around us at the moment. That survival of the fittest may sometimes look a lot like getting along. Pretty pertinent in these later days.

This root behaviour is part of a broader phenomenon researchers call ‘plant neighbour recognition’. Sunflowers appear capable of distinguishing between their own roots and those of strangers, adjusting their growth accordingly. When planted alongside seeds from the same parent plant they compete even less aggressively, growing taller and producing more seeds than when surrounded by unrelated neighbours. Family, it turns out, changes how a plant behaves in the world. A sunflower standing next to a sibling is a different organism from one standing alone.

“Fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.” Merlin Sheldrake, again.

Sunflowers are not the solitary giants they appear. They are social creatures, woven into a quiet web of negotiation, cooperation, and communication that scientists are still only beginning to map. When two neighbouring sunflowers encounter a patch of nutrient-rich soil between them, they don’t rush to claim it. Instead, they deliberately root elsewhere - deferring or coexisting if you like. For a species that can grow the height of a house, this is an amazing act of restraint. It suggests that coexistence can be a stronger evolutionary drive than the dominance we see all around us at the moment. That survival of the fittest may sometimes look a lot like getting along. Pretty pertinent in these later days.

This root behaviour is part of a broader phenomenon researchers call ‘plant neighbour recognition’. Sunflowers appear capable of distinguishing between their own roots and those of strangers, adjusting their growth accordingly. When planted alongside genetic kin - seeds from the same parent plant - they compete even less aggressively, growing taller and producing more seeds than when surrounded by unrelated neighbours. Family, it turns out, changes how a plant behaves in the world. A sunflower standing next to a sibling is a different organism from one standing alone.

Below the soil, this cooperation is facilitated in part by mycorrhizal fungi - the vast underground networks that connect plant roots across a garden, a field, a forest. Through these fungal threads, plants exchange water, phosphorus, and carbon. They don’t just tolerate the network; they invest in their environment, sometimes sending resources to weakened neighbours with no obvious return. I mean.... 🤯

The sunflower participates in this economy, if we should call it such a thing. What looks like an individual is always, underground, a node in something larger, in a distributed system - which, if you spend enough time in rooms with good sound systems, starts to feel like a familiar idea.

Then there is heliotropism - that defining, almost tender behaviour of young sunflowers tracking the arc of the sun across the sky. East in the morning, west by evening, reset overnight. The stem grows faster on its shaded side during the day, slower during the night - a rhythmic cellular elongation that is the plant equivalent of turning your face toward warmth.

Researchers have found this isn’t merely passive phototropism. The east-facing warmth of a sunflower in the morning actively attracts pollinating bees, who prefer warmth to cold. A sunflower that has tracked the sun all night to greet the morning east-facing is running warmer than its surroundings by as much as 10 degrees Celsius. It is, in effect, offering its visitors a heated landing pad, burning its own accumulated energy to make itself more hospitable. The plant isn’t just growing; it is cooperating with the ecosystem around it.

And the bees return the favour. Sunflowers are among the most visited plants by pollinators in a temperate garden. Their nectar is generous; their pollen abundant. The transaction is ancient and mutual - a contract written over millions of years of co-evolution. The sunflower that gives its warmth gets pollinated. The bee that accepts the warmth feeds the colony. Nothing wasted. Everything shared.

When the sunflower reaches maturity, the stem stiffens and the face settles eastward permanently - as if having danced long enough, it finally finds its stillness. Even this final orientation is an act of service: the fixed east-facing bloom continues to warm its florets in the morning sun, remaining attractive to pollinators long after the dancing is done.

A single sunflower head can produce between 1,000 and 2,000 seeds - far more than any one plant needs for its own reproduction. The excess feeds birds across the autumn and winter months; goldfinches, greenfinches, and house sparrows prise the achenes loose with practised precision. Mammals take what falls to the ground. The sunflower doesn’t hoard its surplus. It produces abundance and releases it.

Native to North America, sunflowers were cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before European contact - not only for food but for dye, medicine, and oil. The Hopi (by coincidence, my middle name!) used the seeds as a food source and the purple-black hulls to make a dye for baskets and body paint. The Cherokee employed the plant medicinally. Across dozens of nations, the sunflower was understood as a provider - something whose abundance, properly tended, could support an entire community - a real relationship between person and plant.

The Cherokee employed the plant medicinally. Across dozens of nations, the sunflower was understood as a provider - something whose abundance, properly tended, could support an entire community. A real relationship between person and plant.

Growing tip fact fans: if you prefer many smaller flowers per stem instead of a single large bloom, cut off the growing tip when the plant reaches 1m tall. This encourages side shoots and branching stems, each of which will form several smaller flowers. A plant that might have stood alone, singular and dominant, learns instead to proliferate - to spread and share its flowering more widely. The gardener’s intervention unlocks a latent generosity the plant was always capable of.

It’s tempting to read something into that.

Sunflowers get stressed: When stressed by insects or disease, sunflowers emit volatile compounds that neighbouring plants can detect and respond to - priming their own defences before the threat arrives. A kind of early warning system, distributed across a field. A form of collective care that travels through the air, invisible and constant.

The sunflower standing alone in your garden is speaking - to the bees landing on its warm face, to the fungi threading through the soil around its roots, to the seeds it is already preparing to scatter. It is embedded, always, in a conversation larger than itself.

The question is whether we’re paying close enough attention to hear it…

Musicians, it turns out, have always been drawn to the sunflower. Freddie Hubbard wrote Little Sunflower in 1967 - a modal jazz standard built around D minor, warm and unhurried, that’s been covered so widely it’s practically become part of the furniture. Notably, it’s an instrumental: the sunflower communicated without words, just as the plant itself does. More recently, Post Malone and Swae Lee sent Sunflower to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on the back of a Spider-Man film, and Rex Orange County found resilience in the image on his 2017 track of the same name. Even Harry Styles had a go - which, depending on your Sunday morning, is either deeply comforting (mine) or entirely beside the point.

The sunflower has never been short of admirers. What it had been short of, until now, was someone willing actually to listen to one, which brings us onto…Scottish producer Brian d’Souza - known to many as Auntie Flo ()

He spent the past year listening to all of this more closely than most. His Plants Can Dance project captured biodata from his son Hector’s sunflower growing in their London garden, feeding that living electrical information into a modular synthesiser to build an album that traces the full arc of a sunflower’s life. Released on Music to Watch Seeds Grow By - that’s us - the result is seven tracks that feel less like compositions and more like transcriptions. Patient, faithful documentation of something that took the right conditions to exist.

“I chose sunflowers because they embody cooperation over competition,” Brian explains. “When they encounter nutrient-rich soil between two plants, they deliberately root elsewhere to avoid conflict - demonstrating that co-existence can be a stronger evolutionary drive than dominance.”

The album opens with Signs of Life - sparse bleeps emerging from near-silence, a seed in soil, a first electrical pulse. By Germination, the structure is forming above the surface. Irrigation brings fluid movement and the sense of underground negotiations beginning: roots sensing moisture, reaching, responding - feeling their way into that subterranean web of exchange. Heliotropism is the album’s most kinetic moment - the sunflower orienting toward light, like, as Brian describes it, a dancer moving toward a single strobe on a dancefloor of soil. Stand Tall carries the weight of a stalk finally strong enough to bear what’s coming. Sunshine, Freedom, and a Little Flower gathers every sound across the album into a single, complete portrait.

The final track, Hector’s Sunflower, is a coda and a dedication. Named for the boy whose garden plant started all of this - whose observation, curiosity, and care made the whole project possible - it ends the album as a reminder that behind the botanical research and modular synthesis, this began with a child watching something grow.

It began, in other words, with attention. Which is maybe the most radical act available to any of us in these complicated days

“You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can’t just wait around - you have to water it and take care of it.” Bootsy Collins

Brian d’Souza has done exactly that. And what grew is well worth the wait. 🌻🌻🌻

Brian d’Souza’s Plants Can Dance (Sunflowers) is out now on Music to Watch Seeds Grow By. Last few cassettes that coome with a packet of sunflower seeds included, and as a digital download at auntieflo.bandcamp.com.

Deep in the woods at our very own Bush of Ghosts stage at Watching Trees 25, Scottish producer Brian d’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, brought his ‘Plants Can Dance’ project to life in a five-hour ambient set beneath a canopy of trees.

Drawing from the playlists he’s been curating for Imperial College’s psychedelic therapy trials, d’Souza transformed the clearing into what he describes as “a sanctuary away from the main stage,” where human – and non-human – audiences alike could experience music designed to mirror the quiet intelligence of the natural world.

This 90 min excerpt captures the heart of that nocturnal performance, guiding listeners through the Ascent, Peak, and Descent phases – a journey filtered from the vast database of ambient music d’Souza has amassed over five years of running Ambient Flo radio. The setting itself became integral to the experience: darkness creating a natural sensory deprivation that, as d’Souza notes, allows listeners to become “more absorbed in their other senses, including the sounds they hear.”

At the core of d’Souza’s ‘Sunflowers’ next instalment for our Music To Watch Seeds series lies a profound botanical truth: sunflowers practice cooperation over competition. Recent research reveals that when these plants encounter nutrient-rich soil between neighbours, they deliberately root elsewhere to avoid conflict – a form of underground etiquette that challenges our traditional understanding of survival of the fittest. D’Souza’s album captures this behaviour sonically, using biodata from his son’s sunflower in their London garden, converted into sound through his modular synthesiser via Instruo’s Scion module.

This live performance extends that concept into the forest, where ambient music fulfils its original definition – having enough space to mix with environmental sounds, creating a novel soundscape at all times. As d’Souza reflects on Peter Wohlleben’s ‘Hidden Life Of Trees’ and its description of forests as interconnected social networks, the Bush of Ghosts set becomes a meditation on what he calls “the More Than Human world” – a space where silence represents the fragility of life, and where trees, unlike festival-goers, “aren’t going to leave the dancefloor if they don’t like a track.”

The result is an invitation to forge a deeper connection with the natural world, to witness how plants can indeed dance.

Who are you, why were you at Bush of Ghosts and what does this twig-constructed stage deep in the woods mean to you at Watching Trees?

I’m Brian d’Souza, last year i did a five hour ambient set at Bush Of Ghosts, playing music from the playlists I’ve been curating for some of Imperial Colleges psychedelic therapy trials. The stage was a nice addition to the festival, a sanctuary away from the main stage.

Tell us about this mix and how it was constructed?

I took a long time filtering through the music I’d pooled together for the psychedelic therapy trials. Most of this was from the huge database of ambient music I’d amassed through the five years of running Ambient Flo radio. The performance was split into six phases, which peaked somewhere in the middle. This two-hour section takes us from the Ascent phase, through Peak and down into the Descent.

How does performing ambient music in a forest differ from a traditional venue, and does the living environment around you become part of the composition itself?

Its always nice to perform outside and in nature, however, it was night so was very dark so maybe the impact was lessened. Nice to have a natural toilet within the vicinity though!

How does the physical setting where ambient music is experienced change its meaning or emotional impact?

I think that goes for any music, it’s as much about hearing the space, the soundsystem, the artistry as the song. Ambient Music is inherently environmental music – it’s original defintion relates to it’s ability to have enough space to that it mixes with environmental sounds, creating a novel soundscape at all times.

Surrounded by trees at night, How does playing for both human and non-human audiences shift your awareness?

It would be interesting if we could ask the trees. I’ve been reading Peter Wohlleben’s ‘Hidden Life Of Trees’ where he describes the interconnected nature of a forest and a tree’s ability to pick up and communicate signals, kinda like a social network. So it’s fun to think of the More Than Human world in situations like this, and with trees, at least they aren’t going to leave the dancefloor if they don’t like a track.

Brian Eno defined ambient music as something that can be “actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored.” In a forest setting like Bush of Ghosts, can it ever truly be ignored when nature itself is so present?

I guess it depends on the time of day – nature is much more vocal in the morning, especially with the Dawn Chorus. So perhaps at that time, nature would mask the music, but at other times the music would be more present? Whether you listen or ignore it is up to you, though, and everyone will have different abilities in that sense.

How does your music composition change for day versus night phases in a plant’s life cycle? Playing at night under the trees, did that nocturnal setting shift how you approached the performance?

It’s nice to play at night, as you experience a natural sensory deprivation of sight in the darkness. This hopefully means one is more absorbed in their other senses, including the sounds they hear. The differences,for performance, are probably more subtle.

Your album for Music To Watch Seeds Grow By captures biodata from your son’s sunflower in your London garden. Can you walk us through the technical process of converting that living data into sound through the modular synth?

It’s simple really: there are a bunch of devices out there that work like a galvanometer – picking up water and other electrical signals within living things and turning that biodata into sound. For the Sunflowers album, I used Instruo’s Scion module to do this, connecting the clips to a living sunflower and then composing the tracks using the sunflower's data. My intention was to attempt to track a sunflower’s life cycle and embody that in sound.

What role does silence or pauses play in evoking this process?

Absolutely, in this case, silence represents the fragility of life and is especially evident in the opening few songs, which are intended to embody the earlier stages of the sunflower's life cycle.

What does ambient mean to you?

Brian Eno, Deep Listening, Ambient Flo

The research for your Seeds project shows sunflowers deliberately avoid competing underground, choosing cooperation instead. Did working with this data change how you think about collaboration or your own creative process?

Not really but help re-enforce my view that collaboration is the key to musical utopia.

Do you use specific frequencies or tonalities that resonate with the natural world? If so which instruments or sounds evoke the feeling of nature and growth most effectively for you?

I’ve experimented with different tunings that are supposedly more in sync with the frequencies found in nature. I think the jury is still out on these, mainly because there are too many variables in terms of how subjective this all is to be able to make universal statements.

What did you grow in your garden this year, and what’s your favorite part of the planting process?

We have two veg patches in our garden, which i made use of for the first time. As well as sunflowers, we grew tomatoes, potatoes and a range of herbs – sage, cress, thyme, rosemary. We were less successful with carrots, lettuce and spinach.

What should listeners take away from experiencing Plants Can Dance beyond just the music itself?

A deeper connection with the natural world.

When are you happiest?

In the studio creating new ideas

When’s the last time you bought a plant or seeds, and what was it?

See above!

If you were a plant, what would you be and why?

An old oak tree: wise, stoic, solid, respected and a supporter of life under my canopy!

Who are you, why were you at Bush of Ghosts and what does this twig-constructed stage deep in the woods mean to you at Watching Trees?

I’m Brian d’Souza, last year i did a five hour ambient set at Bush Of Ghosts, playing music from the playlists I’ve been curating for some of Imperial Colleges psychedelic therapy trials. The stage was a nice addition to the festival, a sanctuary away from the main stage.

Tell us about this recording and how it was constructed?

If you mean the mix, I took a long time filtering through the music i’d pooled together for the psychedelic therapy trials. Most of this was from the huge database of ambient music I’d amassed through the five years of running Ambient Flo radio. The performance was split into six phases, which peaked somewhere in the middle. This two hour section takes us from the Ascent phase, through Peak and down into the Descent.

How does performing ambient music in a forest differ from a traditional venue, and does the living environment around you become part of the composition itself?

Its always nice to perform outside and in nature, however, it was a night so was very dark so maybe the impact was lessened. Nice to have a natural toilet within the vicinity though!

How does the physical setting where ambient music is experienced change its meaning or emotional impact?

I think that goes for any music, it’s as much about hearing the space, the soundsystem, the artistry as the song. Ambient Music is inherently environmental music – it’s original defintion relates to it’s ability to have enough space to that it mixes with environmental sounds, creating a novel soundscape at all times.

Surrounded by trees at night, How does playing for both human and non-human audiences shift your awareness?

It would be interesting if we could ask the trees. I’ve been reading Peter Wohlleben’s ‘Hidden Life Of Trees’ where he describes the interconnected nature of a forest and a trees ability to pick up and communicate signals, kinda like a social network. So it’s fun to think of the More Than Human world in situations like this, and with trees, at least they aren’t going to leave the dancefloor if they don’t like a track.

Brian Eno defined ambient music as something that can be “actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored.” In a forest setting like Bush of Ghosts, can it ever truly be ignored when nature itself is so present?

I guess it depends on the time of day – nature is much more vocal in the morning, especially with the Dawn Chorus. So perhaps at that time, nature would mask the music but in other times the music would be more present? Whether you listen or ignore it is up to you though, and everyone will have different abilities in that sense.

How does your music composition change for day versus night phases in a plant’s life cycle? Playing at night under the trees, did that nocturnal setting shift how you approached the performance?

It’s nice to play at night as you have a natural sensory deprivation of sight due to the darkness. This hopefully means one is more absorbed in their other senses, including the sounds they hear. The differences for performance are probably more subtle.

Your album for Music To Watch Seeds Grow By captures biodata from your son’s sunflower in your London garden. Can you walk us through the technical process of converting that living data into sound through the modular synth?

It’s simple really: there are a bunch of devices out there that work like a galvanometer – pickling up of water and other electrical signals within living things and turning that biodata into sound. For the Sunflowers album I used Instruo’s Scion module to do this, connecting the clips to a living sunflower and then composing the tracks using the sunflowers data. My intention was to attempt to track a sunflowers life cycle and embody that in sound.

What role does silence or pauses play in evoking this process?

Absolutely, in this case silence represents the fragility of life and is especially evident in the opening few songs, which are intended to embody the earlier stages of the sunflowers life cycle.

What does ambient mean to you?

Brian Eno, Deep Listening, Ambient Flo

The research for your Seeds project shows sunflowers deliberately avoid competing underground, choosing cooperation instead. Did working with this data change how you think about collaboration or your own creative process?

Not really but help re-enforce my view that collaboration is the key to musical utopia.

Do you use specific frequencies or tonalities that resonate with the natural world? If so which instruments or sounds evoke the feeling of nature and growth most effectively for you?

I’ve experimented with different tunings that are supposedly more in sync with the frequencies found in nature. I think the jury is still out on these, mainly because there are too many variables in terms of how subjective this all is to be able to make universal statements.

What did you grow in your garden this year, and what’s your favorite part of the planting process?

We have two veg patches in our garden, which i made use of for the first time. As well as sunflowers, we grew tomatoes, potatoes and a range of herbs – sage, cress, thyme, rosemary. We were less successful with carrots, lettuce and spinach.

What should listeners take away from experiencing Plants Can Dance beyond just the music itself?

A deeper connection with the natural world.

When are you happiest?

In the studio creating new ideas

When’s the last time you bought a plant or seeds, and what was it?

See above!

If you were a plant, what would you be and why?

An old oak tree: wise, stoic, solid, respected and a supporter of life under my canopy!

Brian d’Souza’s ode to Sunflowers is out now on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By on a recycled cassette and comes with a packet of Sunflower seeds to sow whilst you play the music to watch your seed grow by.

Tracklisting

Hybrid Palms – Ocean Plaza
Cool Maritime – Amphibia
Richard Norris – Fire
The NRG – LA Inhabitants
Green-House – Perennial Bloom
Imaginary Softwoods – Mr. Big Volume
Lemna – Lapis Lazuli
Wallace – By The Lake
Grand River – Petrichor
Bing & Ruth – The Pressure of this Water
Elori Saxl – Blue
Takashi Kokubo, Andrea Esperti – Lights Of Alpha Centauri
Tim Hecker – Violet Monumental I
Tim Hecker – Violet Monumental II
Butch & Vogt – Bliss (Reprise)
Caterina Barbieri – Fantas for Electric Guitar
Holden & Zimpel – Incredible Bliss
Jo Johnson – The Wave Ahead of the Wave Ahead
Grand River – Human
Heinali – Vita Nova+C43
Loscil & Lawrence English – Cyan
Alessandro Cortini – La sveglia (drum version)
GAS – Der Lange Marsch 2
Tim Hecker – The Piano Drop
Brian d’Souza – The Beach
Imaginary Softwoods – Diagram Of The Universe

“I have come to the conclusion that this album contains a spirit with which we can interact as if we also had one.”

That line perfectly captures what I’m trying to articulate. That quality to certain music that operates on a different frequency - beyond what we can easily quantify or explain.

I’ve been having this ongoing - at times slightly heated - conversation with BoG witch (Tia) about how I describe music that touches on the mystical, the spiritual, the unexplainable. She sent me this track before Christmas, and it reminds me of the sounds my parents would play when I was small - music outside of ‘conventional frameworks’. Existing in that beautiful liminal space where sound is something more than just mere ‘entertainment’.

A healing, transformative affair if you like…

And this one, too, invites an experience rather than just offering ‘passive listening’ (something we try never to engage in here at Seeds).

I grew up surrounded by alternative healing practices, mysticism, and ways of understanding the world that exist outside dominant Western scientific frameworks. These weren’t fringe beliefs in my household - they were foundational. And honestly, whilst at the time it made it slightly more challenging to grow up in a more traditional schooling framework, I now trust those instincts more than I trust what late-stage capitalism wants to sell us as “rational thought.”

So when we encounter music that channels ancestral wisdom, spiritual energy, or transformative power - music that heals rather than just entertains - we want to celebrate it for exactly what it is.

Thank god BoG witch shares these same leanings…

I don’t see this as music that needs defending or qualifying (anymore); it’s music that knows its purpose. It’s an interesting realisation to come to that maybe, just maybe, my parents might have been right all along…ssh don’t tell ‘em ;)

Morning Trip what a label. This track off that album is 🤩

“Keep finding amazing dead women” BoG Witch

“Could also be dead” <read not replying to any of our emails>

Magic from Mr Hillage in 1979… definitely not dead.

And Priscilla (hoping to hear back from our email soon winking smiley face!)

Recent post from the excellent from alerted our ears to the amazing Liom. Also check their new collab out now.

cloud collecting

cloud collecting #44: Líom

I first came across the Netherlands-based artist Líom in 2020, and her music has stayed with me weekly ever since. Líom’s music offers this rare kind of quiet, and she’s someone I always want more people in the world to hear. If you have followed my…

Read more

9 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · marine eyes

Thanks also to Liom for the Ambient Sleeping Pill heads up.

Discovery from Christian Naujoks on Dial from a couple of years back via Ally Tropicana…

Not forgetting Kayla Painter’s amazing new album on the excellent . Music for when the sun breaks through the window on a crisp winter morning, like it did just now…

Plenty more where these came from…
We’ll try to keep on top of this column this year.
More sound medicine - for all beings, plants and other - as ritual, as connection.

Want something else to be going on in the meantime, or want to hear this more
(hint: play this round and round and round):

…best check BoG Witch’s In Reverie show on ROVR here.

💚 🌱 👀

There’s something about walking, at least there is for me anyway. Not just the movement but the way it opens space for listening, opens up my mind. I wish my knees would hold up so I could run more, but walking is a very close second. With both, there’s nothing much else that can get in your way… For Glasgow-based artist Susannah Stark, the walk from the city to Carbeth becomes a meditation on paying attention, on taking your time with things, on letting roots guide the way.

In Stark’s work, sensitivity is a form of attentiveness, a willingness to be present with the human voice, with the spaces between sounds, with what emerges when you slow down enough to notice what’s around you. Remember when we all used to do that? Her approach to creating music mirrors the patient rhythm of plant growth – something we like around these parts – not forced or rushed, but allowed to unfold at its own pace.

“Pay attention to the roots!” Stark says. It’s a gardener’s wisdom that applies equally to music-making. Sometimes the most beautiful things emerge when we’re open to what’s already there, quietly, peacefully waiting beneath the surface.

For this mix, Stark draws on her love of vocal harmony and polyphony, choral music and modular synthesis - the human voice and the electronic landscape working together like walking and listening, movement and stillness, roots and growth.

Her amazing “Minor Gestures” album on the consistently excellent Nightschool Records explores these same territories: softness, rhythm, encounters between beings, and the different dimensions of speech and sound.

The walk to Carbeth is a ritual many Glaswegians know, a movement out from the city’s grey stone into something wilder, more open. This mixtape captures that journey as Stark experiences it: when you’re happiest taking your time with things, when you’re sensitive to what’s around you, when the flowering plant you didn’t expect becomes the most meaningful bloom in your garden.

Get your headphones on, get your hands dirty with the earth, and let this mix guide you out of the city and into growth…

Who are you?

Somebody sensitive

Why are you here?

To create and share and become aligned with community

When are you happiest?

When taking my time with things

How do you approach creating music that mirrors the slow, steady rhythm of plant growth?

Paying attention

What did you grow in your garden this year?

I tried to grow coriander, sunflowers, and chamomile last year, but the only thing that came up was a flowering plant from the previous gardener.

Got any growing tips?

Pay attention to the roots!

How do you feel when you see the first sprouts emerge when planting a seed?

Happy

Congrats, you’ve won the plant lottery! You can choose anything you want. What is it?

A giant tree being.

What instruments or sounds do you evoke the feeling of nature and growth most effectively?

The human voice and modular synths

If you were a plant, what would you be and why?

Wild rose, because it smells good and grows by the sea

What is your favourite part of the planting process?

Getting hands dirty

Are there specific genres or styles of music that you feel naturally complement the act of planting seeds?

Usually listen to vocal harmony & polyphony, choral music

Mion-phuingean ‘Minor Gestures’: Susannah Stark & Band is out now on Night School.
Catch Susannah live this year. Full details here: susannahstarkmusic.com/

Tracklisting

Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh – finally i divided myself into three
RÓIS – a woman goes swimming in a lake
Ailie Ormston – Engine Mod
Evie Waddell – Bogaidh
Drew McDowall – Each Surface of Night
Morvyn Menzies – Crodh Chailein
James Graham – O ’s toil’s gur ro-thoil leam
Sholto – Solo Organ
Eithne Ni Uallachain – Babóg na Bealtaine
Cindytalk – Dream Ritual
Ishbel MacAskill – Eilean Fraoich
Semay Wu – A Long Road
Curlew – Air
Susannah Stark & Band – Dithis Phrìosanach
Harry Gorski-Brown – Buain na choirce
An Choirm Cheoil san Áras Béal Áthan Ghaorthaidh
The Poozies – Dheanainn Sugradh