Brian d'Souza on making music from mushrooms

In 2023 Glastonbury Festival’s Silver Hayes dance music area celebrated its tenth anniversary with three new stage creations, alongside an area for debate and forward-thinking discussions as well as an experimental art installation called the Hayes Pavilion. Designed by festival set designer Simon Carroll, the structure was made from salvaged timber and mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms, to explore whether mycelium could be used as a way to build more sustainable sets and stages for festivals in the future.

An exciting byproduct of this installation was the music created especially for the Pavilion by Scottish DJ, producer and sound artist Brian d’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, and Irish techno DJ Or:la in collaboration with harpist Róisín Berkeley. Almost a year on, the resulting Mycorrhizal Fungi is set to be the first release on d’Souza’s A State of Flo label this April. With bespoke artwork from multi-award winning artist Jana Nicole, which includes a special scratch and sniff scent component. Part of the design is also reactive to UV light, just as some mushrooms have bioluminescent properties.

Known more in musical circles for his uplifting, dancefloor-ready highlife rhythms, on Mycorrhizal Fungi, d’Souza takes on something far more experimental and unpredictable. But it’s not the first time d’Souza has worked with mushrooms. Following the launch of his 24-hour Ambient Flo radio station dedicated to relaxation and music being used as a form of therapy, in 2021 d’Souza was approached by Imperial College London to curate music for a psychedelic research project involving psilocybin, more commonly known as magic mushrooms. Having heard about this, the team behind Silver Hayes got in touch, and the resulting mushroom-inspired commissions that both Or:la and d’Souza created were looped in the Pavilion for the entirety of 2023’s Glastonbury Festival.

To create his four pieces of music he captured electrical activity from four very different species of mushroom – oyster, reishi, lion’s mane and shiitake – some of which was recorded during a commission at the 2023 Chelsea Flower Show in their mushroom den. But even that wasn't his first time recording sound from a living plant. In 2022, for Scotland's Dandelion Project, he used PlantWave technology on a selection of herbs. “That was my first foray into this whole kind of bio-electrical, bio-sonification world, using the electricity that plants, fungi and living things create to turn that into musical notes – MIDI – to create pieces of music inspired by that.

“It's kind of like a duet between myself and the plant, or the fungi, or the living thing.” d’Souza continues: “That creatively for me was quite enlightening because it removes a huge part of the creative compositional process when you're trying to put together music. It allows the plant to be the composer; it'll just spit out all these random notes as an indication that it's alive.”

Brian d'Souza. Image: Chris Keenan.

There’s an undeniably exciting unpredictability to this kind of music-making process, and by “eavesdropping in a way” on these fungi and their mycelium networks, d’Souza’s four mushroom collaborations, with no discernible notes or rhythms, are ambient extraterrestrial works; Oyster has ominous undertones, Reishi a magical twinkle, Lion’s Mane an unsettling bubble, while Shiitake has a bending effervescence. 

What we can hear is the product of d’Souza’s digital manipulation of the mushrooms' biodata as he designates certain sounds to each mushroom’s unique set of electronic signals. “The challenge is to take what it gives you and then turn it into something that humans can listen to and that's palatable,” he tells us. “A lot was to do with trying to preserve the essence of what [each] mushroom was giving to me through the electricity, and then making artistic decisions that were kind of sympathetic to the mushroom’s characteristics.”

Creating music this way obviously comes with its risks, so you can imagine how risky doing it live might be. At last year’s All Things Fungi Festival, having only practised in his studio with the reishi mushroom, an opportunity to also perform with lion’s mane on the day, thanks to the Bristol Fungarium, was too tempting for d’Souza to turn down. But the mushroom was giving him different outputs – it wasn't how he’d practised.

"I felt like it was kind of like playing with me a little bit, because I plugged in my little electrodes, and it sort of made a few sounds and then it stopped… What it should do is continually generate electricity and then therefore you've got the sound source," but it didn't go to plan, he tells us, recalling the stress of 200 pairs of eyes watching him try to make it work. "So there's a beauty of live improvised performances, but that took me by surprise,” he says. “Eventually it did start working, and I was like, ‘this mushroom's really sort of playing with me here.’”

With a live biosonification set planned to mark the launch of Mycorrhizal Fungi at EartH Hackney this month, and a return to the All Things Fungi Festival later in the year, sadly it might be a while before d’Souza’s mushroom music finds it way to Scotland.

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Mycorrhizal Fungi is set for release on 19 Apr via A State of Flo
Brian d'Souza plays EartH Hackney, London, 19 Apr and All Things Fungi Festival, West Sussex, England, 13-15 Sep; Auntie Flo plays Hidden Door's 10th Birthday Party, St James Quarter, Edinburgh, 10-11 May