Plants Can Dance, a compilation album bringing together some of the leading practitioners in what can perhaps be called a new genre of ‘plant/fungi-inspired music’ will be released on 26th June.

Curated by British sound artist, Brian d’Souza aka Auntie Flo, it features songs by Tarun Nayar aka Modern Biology, OMMA (co-founder of Playtronica), British sound artists Jason Singh, Justin Wiggan and Dr Helen Anahita Wilson and more.

There are many different approaches to creating music inspired-by plants - ‘biosonification’ - and this ground-breaking, first-of-its-kind album brings these together into one body of work for the first time.

The physical release also includes a 7500 word, 28-page magazine, which goes into detail on these approaches, discussion and reflections on the nature/music connection.

To pre-order a copy of the vinyl and ‘zine, visit our shop or click HERE for streaming links:

This week, we released the second single - ‘Growing Roots’ by Modern Biology & Zekarias Musele Thompson.

Meeting the global superstar of plant music

Tarun Nayar aka Modern Biology is the superstar of plant (and mushroom) music, with viral videos and hundred of thousands of followers across social media.

He’s a pioneer in the field, bringing his Mushroom Church events to parks around the globe and developing the new Pocket SCÍON device in partnership with Instruō synths.

Tarun and I share a similar journey into the world of plant and mushroom music, and have both been working in the field for a number of years. We finally crossed paths during the promotional campaign for our Mushroom Music event in London in 2023, which served as the launch of Mycorrhizal Fungi EP, the first release on A State Of Flo records. It was an honour when he agreed to be part of the Plants Can Dance compilation.

His work is all about accessibility - using his music to unlock a sense of wonder and play within his audiences. Originally a biologist before turning to music, he is still very interested in the underlying science and recently ran an experiment which tested whether the Pocket SCÍON could pick up various interactions with a pothos plant and represent them with its sound output. The signs are very promising… and we’ll share more on the results as they become clear.

We caught up at the recent MOTH Festival of Ideas in London where he told me about the experiment and how the collaboration came together for Growing Roots:

For the Plants Can Dance Magazine, Tarun penned an article giving his insight into the experiment. We’ve included it below but would encourage you to support the album for the full context.

Happy Listening

Brian d’Souza - Curator of Plants Can Dance

Earth Month Experiment by Tarun Nayar

My laptop is doing double duty as I write this short piece. In the window beneath my notes app is a custom Python program generating a live plot of the electrical resistance of the pothos plant sitting next to me—mediated by a small, glowing device called the Pocket Scion. Small electrical changes are generating both musical information (which I’m not listening to at the moment—Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is my soundtrack on this sunny spring morning) and data produced by the changing conductivity of this plant and a number of other factors.

The plot looks like an ever-expanding graph: the y-axis is electrical resistance in megaohms, and the x-axis is time. The line wiggles and wobbles, occasionally making a deep plunge, and very visibly responds to my touch. There is over 150 years of Western scientific data showing that plants are highly responsive electrical beings (just like humans and the rest of life), but actually seeing the changing state of the plant’s electrome is fascinating. I find I can go about most of my day forgetting that plants, mushrooms—this whole living system—is alive. And that this living system has been alive for four billion years (!). Despite cataclysmic climate events, mass extinctions, meteors (and now humans), we’re still here. In perhaps the best example of resilience, courage, and hope, life simply doesn’t give up.

Biochemist and professor Nick Lane posits that proton gradients—electrochemical charge differences across thin mineral barriers—were the engine that produced life, before DNA and before RNA. Around four billion years ago, protocells forming in the porous mineral walls of deep-sea hydrothermal vents developed electrochemical gradients across thin inorganic barriers. These gradients allowed work: they powered chemical reactions that built organic molecules, including the Krebs cycle intermediates that form the building blocks of life. The harnessing of these proton gradients to make ATP is as universally conserved across all life as the genetic code itself. Every living thing on Earth, from a bacterium to this sword fern, maintains an electrical gradient across its membranes. Author Sally Adee puts it succinctly in her book We Are Electric: electricity may be the most ancient thing about life itself.

This simple act of watching and listening to these electrical changes has had a profound effect on my life. You could say it’s been all-consuming. I work with my good friends at Instruō Synthesizers to make machines, I tour as a “plant and mushroom music” artist, and I build installations for galleries and museums. I think about this practice night and day. Why? I think it’s because it reconnects me to wonder. I feel like a child in nature again—exploring, asking questions, making discoveries, and asking new questions. It also connects me to the more-than-human world, an ancient relationship that Indigenous knowledge traditions have cultivated since humans have been human.

“Plant music” has existed since the late 1970s, shortly after the publication of The Secret Life of Plants. What I’m most excited about now is that much of the “woo” around this practice has been left behind. There’s no longer a need to fetishise or exoticise the practice of making music with the living environment—most people are now familiar with the idea. Devices like the Pocket Scion are affordable enough to be widely accessible (and open-source DIY approaches are readily available online thanks to people like Sam Cusumano). These tools allow access to the raw data—not just post-algorithm musical notes and rhythms. Using readily available tools, literally anyone can generate a hypothesis, design an experiment, and test it.

What do these signals mean? Are they biological? Pure physics? Just noise? What’s the most appropriate way to turn them into sound? What ethical considerations should we keep in mind? These are now easily testable questions. On April 15th, 2026, for Earth Month, we’ll be exploring some of them together. Using a simple protocol and easy-to-run Python code, we’ll be asking Pocket Scion users around the world to spend 15 minutes connected to their own pothos plant. We’ll test a simple hypothesis: that Epipremnum aureum produces a detectable electrical resistance shift following physical manipulation. We’re using experimental protocols derived from the scientific literature, but testing with our small $150 device rather than lab equipment worth many multiples of that. I have no idea what we’ll find. But looking, exploring, wondering, and connecting with community is the whole point. This initiative costs nothing beyond a little time.

I can’t wait to see what the broader community does with these tools. The idea of community citizen science–art projects was one of the driving forces behind this device—and others like it. In these charged times, these simple, nature-based community projects can reconnect us with the resilience, courage, and hope of the living world.

Tarun Nayar aka Modern Biology, May 2026

Plants Can Dance Album Launch Party - London 28th June

For those in London, please join us for Plants Can Dance album launch party in East London.

TICKETS

We’ll be unveiling the ‘Living Ecosystem’ by Lamine for the first time. An installation he’s been working on for the past year. It is truly something to behold!

We’ll have guest speakers from EarthPercent, Glitch and a DJ set from Mari Kimura (Gondwana Records).

This week, I’ve been re-reading the book ‘Curation’ by Michael Bhaskar. In it he describes the power and prevalence of the ‘curator’ in the world of excess that we inhabit. We live in a world of abundance - wherever we look, there is more produced that we could ever countenance. In this post-scarcity society, the role of the ‘curator’ as a filter has come to dominate.

Bhaskhar mentions the transition that has taken place from scarcity to abundance and documents how widespread it is: all industries are affected by this, none more so than the arts.

Music is certainly no different, with 100,000s of songs released every day, there is simply no time to listen to them all. And now with AI music, the market is even more flooded.

It wasn’t always like this - Bhaskhar tells the tale of when Beethoven encounter Goethe in ‘The Incident of Teplitz’ around 1812. The two creative titans of the time were very different characters: Goethe was an institutionalised and urbane, Beethoven a wild and maverick thinker.

During their walk together they happened upon some royalty and members of the Austrian imperial court. Goethe’s approach was to move aside, to bow and pay respect - know thy betters.

Beethoven was the opposite, he didn’t see why he must cow to anyone else: he was an artist, a creator and no one with a title and status should be deemed better than him. They should, on the contrary, pay their respect to him!

“Kings and princes can indeed create professors and privy councillors, and bedeck them with titles and orders; but they cannot make great men—spirits that rise above the world's rubbish—these they must not attempt to create; and therefore must these be held in honour.” Beethoven

This story provides an interesting insight into what has become the norm for our society ever since: that Beethoven embodied the emerging Romantic idea that artists were not servants of princes but independent creators whose genius outranked inherited nobility; that creativity has the potential to be the pinnacle of human endeavour and flourishing.

No longer could royals and other aristocrats rely on their lineage or status to be treated as Gods amongst men. Beethoven represented a culture shift that has largely stayed in place ever since.

Before Beethoven, music and the arts had been subservient to institutions such as the church. Whereas his predecessors such as Bach and Mozart wrote their music for the church or their grand patrons, Beethoven wrote his music for himself: a new conception of value and purpose.

“Only Art and Science can raise men to the level of gods” he said.

This set society on a path to hold creativity in highest regard and was widespread, from free marketers such as Adam Smith and entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs across all areas of the arts and beyond.

Can we all be gods?

With the proliferation of tools that give our creative output a platform i.e. social media and the internet, and technical tools that allow us to endlessly create i.e. any music production software that has every instrument, sample and drum loop available at the click of a button we are overwhelmed by options to create . Creativity is everywhere and it is impossible for us to consume all at once.

So, as a result, there are new gods in town. These are the influencers, the curators who provide a crucial filter to tell us what we should focus on.

As I strive to export my creative outputs in the form of my music to a audience that grants me a sustainable future, I’ve realised that one has to identify and find ways to work with these new gods.

This is obviously not entirely new: the traditional way of doing this was to hire a PR firm and get them to get a new release featured in a magazine or online publication. However, the power and reach of these publications is on the wane. In my experience, getting a review no longer seems to have a huge amount of impact when it comes to selling records. Or at least, it’s not so immediate.

Instead, the new gatekeepers of my world are the likes of Luke Una, Josh Mason aka Somewhere Soul, Colleen Cosmo Murphy’s Balearic Breakfast. These individuals carry just as much weight as publications or institutions such as BBC 6 Music, and although the likes of Gilles Peterson and Jamz Supernova are still vastly influential - I would say even they don’t have the same direct or immediate impact on record sales (maybe they do on streaming/social numbers though).

Case in point:

I’ve written about the huge impact that that Luke Una has had on my career in recent years. When he proclaimed Green City as his ‘Track Of The Year’ in 2024 and featured it in one of his instagram videos, sales more than doubled . It went from a small pressing of 300, to eventually selling over 1200 records.

I met Josh Mason aka Somewhere Soul when we both spoke on a panel last year on the topic of ‘AI versus Human Curation’. I’d only heard of the Somewhere Soul page channel in passing but it was fascinating to hear his insight of how a single post from him bigging up a song has led to labels reporting an uplift of 1000s more record sales. He now has a following of close to 1 million people.

I spoke to Josh after and luckily he seemed to be a fan of my music. I got his address and sent him the new Havana Sessions record as soon as it was released. A couple of days ago, he did a post featuring ten of his tracks for the summer and Havana City was on there - number five in his ten images.

The response was immediate, sales started dropping in. In a 24 hour period I sold over 50 records on Bandcamp - and that number is still rising. I double down with a post of my own that then saw the likes of Luke Una bigging it up too in a comment - double win!

To put this in context, I’d sold 50 or so in total in the first 3 weeks of release on Bandcamp and another 50 during our UK tour. 200 have been sent to the record stores for release in 4th June and now I only have 50 left.

Buy one here:

So Josh helped sell a quarter of the records I had listed on Bandcamp due to one post in which my track was nestled as the fifth image in amongst ten others. Wow.

In this world of excess, Somewhere Soul, Luke and others are crucial tastemakers - the yield an inordinate amount of power in an era when the market is flooded and traditional media holds far less influence than before.

So when they do mention you - happy days! I can’t imagine how much music they get sent though, so who will be the filter for the filter?

Long live the new Gods!

The dust has settled: last Saturday we finished a six date UK tour with the Auntie Flo band. Was it worth it? From a purely artistic and emotional perspective, I can say 100% ‘YES’. From a commercial perspective, I can say ‘Perhaps NOT’.

As ever, I thought I’d use this Substack as an opportunity to give readers a BTS insight into the various aspects of touring you perhaps don’t see, which may be useful if you are in a band and are looking to embark on a similar mission.

To set the scene: Over the past three years, I’ve been exploring the best way to perform my music as ‘Auntie Flo’. I come from a DJ background, but DJ gigs in my 40s are proving to be relatively thin on the ground compared to my pretty much full schedule pre-COVID. The late hours and regular travel aren’t necessarily compatible with the stage of life I’m in.

I’m producing so much music nowadays that I really wanted a way to perform it to an audience, so I set myself the goal of figuring out the best way to do this. In the last two years, I’ve tried DJ sets, solo live club shows, playing as a duo, an audio-visual live set, DJing using only my own tunes, and finally performing with a five-piece band when I was asked to play at Jazz Cafe in October last year.

During that gig, something clicked - the place was packed and the gig time and venue meant that many of my friends and family could come out (is that not a huge part of what it’s all about?). From a musical perspective, the band made a lot of sense: I was able to bring in many of the musicians I’d worked with to make the music - Sarathy Korwar, Ziggy Funk, Cyrus Atkinson, Andre Marmot and, more recently, Moncaya to represent the musicality of the songs.

The videos we shared of that gig led on to another: Magnetic Fields Nomads in India. A festival I’d always wanted to play at but never had the opportunity. Now, with the band, they suddenly wanted to book me.

The question was: what next? I’ve been speaking to one of my favourite labels (who will rename nameless for now) about a potential new album release and their first question was - “will you be able to tour it?” The was the exact same question that was asked by Brownswood before they signed Radio Highlife. These labels both felt like they needed me to be delivering a proper live show in order to push any releases - live music is key.

But could we pull it off? After blurting out a “yes”, I had to put our money where our mouth was and hence this UK tour was borne. My agent Jack did a great job of arranging the gigs with decent flat fees (instead of the alternative revenue share option) attached to each.

Tour Logistics

After much jostling with the dates, we ended up with four UK shows back-to-back, meaning the best way was to hire a car and drive between the venues.

After crunching the numbers, I realised we could make everything work with a five-piece band. Moncaya was along for the ride and up for supporting with her solo show, so a double bill was a stronger package for promoters to put on. She’d play solo for 30-mins and then join us as the singer in Auntie Flo later.

We invited Tim Doyle aka Chiminyo along to drum too, completing the line up up.

We got off to a rocky start when the car hire place was outside of the Lime parking zone!!

To keep costs low, we had no tour manager or driver. I had to act as both - hiring the car, organising logistics, doing all the driving and arranging everything with the venues.

Rising petrol prices due to the Iran War didn’t help us at all - Thanks Trump! And I didn’t realise how much it would be for parking at many of these city centre venues…

We booked cheap twin-room hotels with breakfast included. And the venues offered us dinner. This meant that we could drive to the venue, get fed, do the gig, check into the hotel and get breakfast the next day… keeping budgets low and us mostly fed until we arrived at the next venue.

Putting up with band member snoring was one of the downsides of this arrangement but it was a compromise we all had to make!

Of course, we couldn’t resist the odd services stop, esp if a farmshop like the legendary Tebay Services (IYKYK) was the option! Much of the daily budget went on sausage rolls … but was much needed from a morale point of view.

We even found the mighty Greggs OUTLET Mecca in Bristol!! So it goes…

We packed the car with merch, which was mostly vinyl records. I’d made sure to press a new single Havana Sessions in time for the shows - and we were lucky to be able to collect 100 copies direct from the pressing plant on the drive up to the first show in Leeds and most of those sold.

With the costs of everything, I personally didn’t make much from the fees but we did sell a bunch of merch… I joked that this tour was really just a mobile car boot sale.

Hiring a merch seller (or roping in friends to help) at the gigs was crucial. I still had to jump on and help pre and post gig, but meeting happy punters after the show was a nice little buzz and confirmation of a job well done.

So what about the gigs?

In my twenty years of doing this, these were some of the best shows I’ve ever been involved with. Every one was a memorable experience and every one exceeded my expectations. The band really gelled together and each gig we did we became tighter as a group. This is important to bare in mind!!!

1. We had FUN. We all got on really well: such a crucial thing when you are stuck in a car with someone for five days back-to-back. Banter levels were high and everyone in the band enjoyed being part of it. Not just a paid gig, it gave each member something more than that. And it needed to with the fees everyone took in order to make it all work. It can’t all be about the money…

2. The gigs were BUSY. We’re not talking sold out shows at every venue, but each being busier than expected. The feedback we had was immense - when individuals come up and say ‘that was the best gig I’ve been to in a long time’ you always have to take it with a pinch of salt, but when that happens dozens of times, it starts to give you a good feeling. So thank you to everyone who came to see us!

3. Closing with a sold out Ronnie Scott’s we managed to get everyone dancing, which rarely happens in that venue. Various staff members told us they’ve ‘never seen an energy like that in the room or a response from the crowd like that’… It felt like one for the memory banks…

4. Big thanks to all the independent venues who stick their necks out to book bands like us. The economics of running a small venue is much the same as running a small band. By working together we can scrap by but it’s truly a team effort.

The videos we shared are a testament to that (more to come!).

Financial Breakdown

We managed to add a sixth show last week as a last-minute replacement for Balimaya Project at the House Of Koko members club. This proved to be a great warm up for Ronnie Scott’s and a brilliant gig in its own right.

Financially, this last minute well paid gig helped the tour break even and gave me a little fee to take home. With merch included, I can say it was just about financially worthwhile - but just remember: breaking even was the mission and we did it!

Tour Fees: £8475 (after booking agent fees)

Musician Fees: £5200

Travel Costs: £1094.35 (petrol/car hire)

Accommodation Costs: £690.12 (sometimes this was covered by the venue)

Instagram ads: £300

Food/Misc/Parking: £708.36

PROFIT/ BRIAN TAKE HOME: +£382.17

MERCH SALES: +£1131.68 (although most of that isn’t profit, the margin on vinyl records is small, and 10% goes to Earth Percent).

As you can see, the tour broke even! And we all walked away with a fee. Is that success? I’m pretty sure that all venues broke even (perhaps with the exceptions of Leeds and Manchester :( ). So do the economics work? Can the independent music sector run on these numbers?

I’m reminded of Kate Nash’s insight into the loses (£26,000!) of her touring and that helps put things into perspective.

For me - we did six dates, and it probably took around ten days of time. The hard reality is that I walk away with a payment of £38.12 per day. Obviously massively under minimum wage!

And the brutal reality is for the next time, we’ll definitely need a tour manager/driver. Doing everything myself was tough. It took me four days to recover!

We didn’t have a photographer - much needed in this social media age. We got lucky with some of the audience footage and venues hiring their own, but next time it would be amazing to document the trip.

I’m not complaining though - this tour was always meant be a test: to draw a line in the sand. It was an experiment to ask -

• Could ‘Auntie Flo’ be a band?

• Could we draw a crowd in cities outside of London (and my home town of Glasgow)?

• Has all the music that I’ve been releasing on A State Of Flo as a 100% independent artist had any meaningful reach?

• Has the relentless social media posts been worth it?

My answer is a resounding ‘YES’ but with much still work to be done. I’m excited for what happens next.

To everyone who came to see us: Thank you! We’re all in this together.

Hopefully this has been useful if you are in a band and are looking to tour. Let me know your experiences!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In case you missed it, we are releasing the first Plants Can Dance album bringing together a new global community of artists who are making music in direct collaboration with the natural world.

It will be released on 26th June on A State of Flo, and the vinyl package comes with a 28-page mini-book featuring articles and insight from all artists, some academics and technologists who have helped pioneer this new movement.

These include Modern Biology, Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, OMMA (founder of Playtronica), Justin Wiggan in collaboration with Norwegian Jazz legend Arve Henriksen, Dr Augustine Leudar and more.

Pre-order and listen to the first single by Jason Singh here:

And find it on your favourite streaming sites here

Album Launch Party 28th June

I’m excited to share news of the album launch party, taking place at our residency in London, at Hideout Hackney Wick 28th June, 4-8pm.

LAUNCH PARTY 28th JUNE TICKETS:

RA - https://ra.co/events/2443545

Dice - https://link.dice.fm/E64115abb9c1

These Sunday afternoon events have been really fun, and we’d love for you to come down and help us celebrate the launch of the album. Lamine and I will be performing talking through the album, and we’ll have a listening playback too. We’ll start with our customary biosonification workshop where you can try making your own music using some of the readily available devices on the market.

It’ll look something like this - Lamine’s ‘living wall installation’ at his Repot Plant Shop.

Plants Can Dance Tour Dates

Lamine and I are also excited to be taking Plants Can Dance on the road this summer, with a combination of performances, larger scale installations and workshops - including a four date residency at Kew Gardens and a massive showcase at Fringe By The Sea in Scotland.

*Dates are Brian only unless stated

16.5.26 - Plants Can Dance at Caught By The River (Lamine Only)

19.5.26 - Plants Can Dance at Sonica Launch Party, Scotland House, London

30.5.26 - Brian d’Souza Sunflowers live at Watching Trees UK

19.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Garden Of Tomorrow presents Solstice, Cornwall

21.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Wildwood UK

26.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

27.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

28.6.26 - PLANTS CAN DANCE ALBUM LAUNCH Hideout, London Brian and Lamine

3.7.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

4.7.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

30.7.26-9.7.26 - Plants Can Dance installation and workshops at Fringe By The Sea, Scotland - Brian and Lamine

22.8.26 - Plants Can Dance at We Out Here Festival (TBC)

26.9.26 - Plants Can Dance, Sonica, Glasgow

30.9.26 - Plants Can Dance, Love Trails, Croatia

Plants Can Dance ‘Zine

As I mentioned, I’ve compiled a 28-page, 7500+ word ‘zine to accompany the release. It features insight from all artists features into their varying creative processes, and also articles on wider topics - ‘ways of listening’, ‘more-than-human' perspectives’ and ‘words of caution’ (on some of the controversy around this music).

The print copies have just arrived so keen to share a few images to get you excited! We’ll share some of the articles on this Substack in due course - a lot to get your teeth stuck into and hopefully start a few conversations.

Much love to Sijya for the design and artwork on this release.

Paid subscribers will get a digital copy of the album and print copy of the zine as part of your subscription. Super supporters will get a copy of the vinyl sent to your home address as soon as we have then and pre-official release.

Subscribe now

If you know anyone who is into music and nature - please share this article!

Share

Over a year in the making, we're excited to share the first Plants Can Dance Compilation: a collection of songs inspired by the wonder of plants by some of the leading practitioners from all around the world.

»»STREAMING AND DOWNLOAD PRESAVE LINKS««

I’ve been exploring ways in which to collaborate with nature, living organisms and the natural world in my music practise over the past six or seven years - a process accelerated by the COVID lockdown and solidified over several artistic commissions: Mushroom Music for the mycelium pavilion at Glastonbury, Sonifying a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, creating a Symphony of Herbs for Dandelion (part of the UK Governments ‘Unboxed’ festival of ideas) and many more.

I’ve presented this work and the accompanying themes via workshops in schools; talks at art institutions such as The Tate Modern, V&A, Design Museum, National Trust; sessions for charities; installations for brands; and performances at festivals - in the UK, Europe, Africa and India.

These projects culminated in the release of ‘Mycorrhizal Fungi’, a multi-sensory vinyl record in collaboration with artist Jananicole, the first release on A State Of Flo records in 2024 and subsequently lead to the launch of our event series Plants Can Dance (and Mushroom’s ‘Sing’) in 2025.

Over these years, I’ve met many musicians, scientists, environmentalists, botanists and experimental artists who share a similar passion - to explore the wonder of nature through the medium of their musical and artistic practise.

This compilation pulls together many of these connections and features pioneers of perhaps what can now be called a burgeoning new musical genre: ‘plant and mushroom music’.

Those featured include: Tarun Nayer aka Modern Biology, Jason Singh, Olga Maximova aka OMMA (co-founder of Playtronica), Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, Justin Wiggan and more. Many tracks are collaborations with celebrated musicians: legendary Norwegian Jazz star Arve Henriksen, cellist Liz Hanks, saxophonist Zekarias Musele Thompson and more.

Accompanying the lush white-vinyl package is a 28-page magazine or mini-book if you like, with articles from all the artists involved as well as insight into related topics - 'More-Than-Human Perspectives', 'Ways Of Listening', 'Technical Approaches', insights from Jason Lim, founder of Instruo modular synths (the company behind the Scion and Pocket Scion devices) and a ‘Note of Caution’ from Dr Augustine Leudar.

What I’ve been most excited to witness is the conversations that are started through this work. These are equally important as the music itself as they demonstrate the wonder and intrigue that these artistic approaches spark. Nature is living and breathing and endlessly-fascinating - can music help us tune more deeply?

We’ve created a mini-book running to 7500+ words covering most of the topics that tend to get raised.

Call it ambient, jazz, electronica or simply plant music, this is a compilation like no other and I’m very excited for you to hear it. Aside from the wider themes, I guarantee the music stands up by itself: it is jaw-droppingly beautiful stuff and I thank all the artists involved for bringing their A-game.

The first single by Jason Singh ‘Tsubaki’ is now up on all streaming platforms and the compilation and ‘zine are available to pre-order. PREORDER HERE

New Plants Can Dance Instagram Page

Follow the journey on our new Plants Can Dance instagram page

I resisted this for so long, but with so much activity to come and a lot going on with my other Auntie Flo projects it makes sense…

Supporters of A State Of Flo will receive the full compilation and ‘zine in the next week, a month ahead of its release, as well as every release on the label.

Super Supporters will receive the vinyl record + zine and a package of previous vinyl releases (if stock is available).

Subscribe now

Ten years ago, I was invited to Havana, Cuba to perform at the first ever Havana World Music Festival. Just take a moment to pause and reflect on what that means - a festival of bands from all around the world, in Cuba, a place which has spent its recent history under a closed Castro regime: pushing back against the dominance of the capitalistic systems from countries such as the US and UK.

Around that time, Cuba began to open itself up to the West and the Havana World Music festival was one of the examples of this, creating an interesting dichotomy. As I found out at the time, culture-led soft power was a primary tool that many countries were keen to exploit, not least the United Kingdom, with the British Council part-funding out trip. This was seen as an opportunity by Western governments to demonstrate superiority, through our cultural exports.

Should I have taken the opportunity to visit, knowing I would be small pawn in this culture-war, or should I visit knowing that it would be an experience of a lifetime, a chance to learn, meet and potentially collaborate?

I obviously chose the latter and it turned out to be a career highlight, despite some challenges.

Leaving politics aside, the musical culture of Cuba is so engrained in its society, and totally infectious from the minute we touched down.

We met so many fascinating people and talented musicians, playing two amazing gigs: firstly performing to 10,000+ at a baseball field overlooking the Malecon and the then being invited to play to perhaps an even bigger street party the next day in new Havana. A weekly free street party, with no alcohol but up to 8,000 very up-for-it young Cubans.

It was fascinating to learn how the live music industry works in Cuba: there are three main departments for broad genres -I believe roughly split between more traditional sounds such as Rhumba, Salsa etc, more Pop and then an Electronic/EDM category.

We were essentially housed within the latter category and had to meet various government departments who asked us a range of questions about our music, our intentions etc, right down to ‘what BPM’s we typically play’. Whatever, we said, we must have passed the test as we became the first non-Cuban band to play at the free street party.

Both gigs were incredible. With the slight downside of the array of Union Jacks that the British council spread around some of the crowd in the middle of our set without telling us!

I’ve had to wrestle with being a political weapon ever since…

The upside was that during these shows, we started putting the word out that we’d have some studio time and any budding musicians were welcome to come and jam with us. We turned up and were met with a line round the block!

During these sessions we recorded a host of tracks that have made it onto various albums - So In Love from Theory Of Flo, Nobody Said It Would Be Easy and Havana Rhythm Dance from Radio Highlife, and now the Havana Sessions, which I’m releasing on A State of Flo records today.

Havana City takes elements of Havana Rhythm Dance, adds some string arrangements, borrowed drums from Green City (hence the name) and Freedom of Birds, and dubs out the whole thing giving everything space to breathe. As per my love of the long song - this is a track to immerse yourself in - with keys, trumpet, talking drum, arp and Andrew Ashong’s triumphant vocals bringing a joyous summer vibe.

I was thinking about the absolute classic by Nuyorican Soul - ‘I am The Black Gold Of the Sun’. Does it measure up to that? I’ll leave it to you to decide!

Die Bailando is a track that holds a special place for me. After day 1 in the studio in Cuba, I chopped up some of the brass recordings and made a six minute loop. I then recorded this young vocalist Eric Alejandro who can up with the lyrics - ‘When I die… I’m going die dancing…’. For the original track, we did two takes, both equally as good so I simply doubled the track length and made this super long minimal electro-rhumba groove - think Ricardo Villalobos… It was original released as our first Highlife World Series record.

Eric’s voice is so unique and powerful, I new he had the potential to be big, and it’s been interesting to see his pathway since that session - now performing to huge audiences around the globe as Cimafunk. He’s even been nominated for a Grammy.

For this 2026 version, I went back to the studio and recorded new guitar parts with Ziggy and drums from Jose Joyette (of Ibibio Sound Machine), creating a new latin-groover with Erics vocals as centre stage.

The final track on the EP is Mother Theresa - also released on the Highlife World Series but it was never pressed to vinyl. The track is basically made up of off-cuts from the Havana sessions as we needed a b-side to the digital release. I added some beats and crow-barred in various bits and bobs from the recordings (which some folk like to point out are in differing keys!!).

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but this track has become one of my most played tracks on Spotify - approaching 2 million plays! So many people I randomly meet tell me how much that track means to them - that they play it at every after party, or on repeat throughout the day… Crazy, I made it in an afternoon without much thought - maybe a creative lesson there.

Go buy Havana Sessions today

Paid supporters get it as part of your subscription. Super supporters get the Vinyl! As well as every other release on the label..

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Auntie Flo Full Band UK Tour: TICKETS

I’m equal parts nervous and excited - I’ve formed a band and going on a proper tour for the first time since 2018: NEXT WEEK!!. There are five of us travelling, I’ve hired a 6-seater car and we’re going to have some fun.

My main question: is it possible to mobilise the 2500+ readers on this Substack, my 13.5k followers on Instagram, 20k on Facebook, 6.3k on Bandcamp (most of whom have purchased a record of mine), and the 21k followers and 51k monthly listeners on Spotify into anything that resembles a real life audience who want to come and check out the live show?

I say these numbers not as a brag but as a genuine question - what is real anymore? You read stories of TikTok/Spotify-famous artists with numbers vastly greater than mine performing to empty stadiums and arenas, as their huge online streaming numbers struggle to translate into tickets sold in the real world.

So much of the music world is now totally siloed.

I’m therefore all too aware that a stream, like, or passive listen, doesn’t make an active fan.

My second question is: can you help?

I would dearly love to make these shows a success and would be delighted to welcome you to attend. If you are in the vicinity of Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh or know anyone who is - please join us. London at Ronnie’s is sold out but there will be tickets on the door.

What I can promise you: the rehearsals have been sounding incredible. After two killer headline live gigs at London’s Jazz Cafe and Magnetic Fields Nomads Festival in India in the past few months, I guarantee that the band is the best way to experience ‘Auntie Flo’.

In the past two years, I’ve experimented with solo live, a duo, an Audio Visual set, and a DJ+FX hybrid playing only my own productions but realistically, the full band is the ultimate way of performing ‘live’.

Although that means maximal effort, much greater expense and logistical challenges for me, it also means a much better show for you, with an array of talented musicians playing real instruments, bringing maximum energy and virtuoso musicianship.

In the age of AI, pre-recorded DJ sets, electronic/live hybrids where a musician can hide behind technology, we’re taking a risk. Will it all be plain sailing?

Perhaps not: but surely that’s the point - it will be raw and it will be joyous.

Why be nervous? With the independent live music scene increasingly under threat, and smaller venues shutting down, I hope people come out to support. Playing in London or Scotland I can safely rely on bringing a good crew of friends to come out, but my contacts are a bit more sparse in Bristol, Leeds and Manchester.

We’ve got so much new music to play and very excited to share news of it in months to come. We’ll be road testing some of these tracks as well as giving fresh voice to some recent favourites and older ones too.

Less samples, more live vocals: Moncaya has been working closely on her vocal reinterpretations of some of my older songs and I’m excited to be working with Cyrus and Ziggy again, who have now got super tight with the material. Bringing the amazingly talented Tim Doyle aka Chiminyo will bring a load of energy too.

Come down early to check Moncaya on support duties too, with her beautiful solo show.

Havana Sessions - special tour vinyl

As a special thank you, I’ll also be doing a brand new pressing of some music I made in Havana, Cuba, made over ten years ago. Tracks like Mother Theresa, which has close to 2 million Spotify plays but has never been pressed onto vinyl will now make itself onto wax for the first time. I’ve done a fresh version of Havana Rhythm Dance feat Andrew Ashong, called Havana City. And a new latin interpretation of Die Bailando featuring Eric Alejandro aka Grammy-nominated Cimafunk.

So if you are one of the many people who come up to me and tell me how much that track means to you, look out for the vinyl pressed specially for these shows. More new on this release soon!

30th April - Leeds, Howard Assembly Rooms

w/ Moncaya

1st May - Bristol, Strange Brew

w/ Moncaya

2nd May - Manchester, Band On The Wall

w/ Bom Nation, Cervo (Banana Hill)

3rd May - Edinburgh, The Pitt

w/ Moncaya, Eclair Fifi, Lord of the Isles, Box Energy

16th May - London, Ronnie Scott’s Late Show SOLD OUT (but with some tickets on the door)

Share

Plants Can Dance - 19th April

TICKETS

Ahead of Plants Can Dance this Sunday, I spoke to one of our guest speakers, climate & culture ambassador Sophia Shnapp on her recent TEDx talk in Ibiza, in which presented the innovative ways in which she has been pioneering to ensure nature is now being credited within the music industry.

Listen here:

Sophia will be delivering a version of her TEDx talk this Sunday 19th April at Plants Can Dance (tickets here) and also at a dinner we are hosting at the new Six Senses Place on the 23rd of April (contact me if you’d like to come along to that).

We chatted about the Glasgow music scene, how she met and worked with Brian Eno and others during the early stages of the EarthPercent charity, the Sounds Right Initiative where nature can be credited and remunerated as an ‘artist’, our collaboration at the UN Oceans conference last year where we created a makeshift hydrophone by placing a microphone in a condom! and my work with Sophia to create a variety of sounds for the talk - ranging from the most ugly, dissonant sound imaginable to the most pleasant…

Here’s an example of the most out of tune sound we made:

And here’s the most in tune:

What do you think?

As you may know, A State Of Flo support Earth Percent - my commitment is to give 10% of all revenue from this Substack and from the label to the charity. If you’d like to support - subscribe now! You’ll receive all releases on the label, some vinyl and a zine - all for just £5.

Subscribe now

Watch the full unedited version of my chat with Sophia here to get a taste for whats in store on Sunday here:

We’ll also be joined by biodesigner Paul JJ Treichl who’ll be giving a talk entitled ‘Plants Can Teach (and Mushrooms Guide)’ - which means he’s already off to a good start!

We’ll kick off with a biosonification workshop at 4pm where you can play around with some of the devices available on the market to make music from the electrical impulses found from living organisms. The talks will begin at around 530pm and we’ll also have a chance to listen to modular synth soundscapes created by myself and Lamine, where we take the biodata from the beautiful array of plants from his Repot plant shop and turn that into music. Hideout do great Sunday roasts by the canal and the event is really relaxed so you can pop in an geek out and then go chill in the bar to digest!

I’m sorry if you tried to buy tickets on DICE, the link has not been working. Instead, please use RA here and there will be tickets on the door. Please join us from 4pm - 8pm!

Auntie Flo UK TOUR

In case you missed it, my band are going on tour in a couple of weeks. It would be incredible if you can join us!

ALL TICKETS

London is sold out but I’m told there will be tickets on the door, so get down early.

If you know anyone in Leeds, Bristol, Manchester or Edinburgh - help us spread the word!!

Here’s a sneak peek of our rehearsals:

2026 Dates:

Here’s a few DJ/Live/Plants Can Dance dates for your diary. Would be lovely to see you on the road :)

More announced soon. Contact me if you’d like to book.

19.4.26 - Plants Can Dance, Hideout, London

23.4.26 - Plants Can Dance, Six Senses, London

30.4.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Leeds

1.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Bristol

2.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Manchester

3.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Edinburgh

16.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Ronnie Scott’s, London

19.5.26 - Plants Can Dance, Cryptic Launch Scotland House

23.5.26 - Auntie Flo DJ, Grow Hackney, London

30.5.26 - Brian d’Souza live at Watching Trees UK

19.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Solstice, Cornwall

20.6.26 - Auntie Flo DJ, Wildwood UK

21.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Wildwood UK

26.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

27.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

28.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Hideout, London

3.7.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

4.7.26 - Plants Can Dance, Kew Gardens

5.7.26 - Kelburn TBA

11.7.26 - Tropical Pressure, Cornwall

1.8.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band TBA

Leave a comment

I was recently in Goa, India, for my second Sultry Mist Festival. I love it there, not only does it allow me to visit a place that I have close family connections to (my auntie, the OG 'Auntie Flo aka Florinda Dantas, lived near where the festival takes place), but the programming, people, venues all make it one of the most unique festival experiences I’ve ever had.

Perhaps this is because it’s run and curated by artists, not primarily musicians, on a shoe string budget and is essentially a 'family affair’ for only 300 people, it feels different and special. Every act is unique in their own way, and every slot on the schedule varies wildly: one minute you have a crazy cabaret show, the next a punk band, the next an electronic act DJing with a PlayStation controller, the next a more traditional Indian classical raga concert, the next New York-based Disco (courtesy of Tom Of England) playing with his daughter with stunning stage design and light show.

They claim it is a ‘festival for all the senses’ and it is certainly that. My own role this year was to provide a biosonification soundtrack to their Sunday lunch, under the name of ‘Food Can Dance’.

The highlight of the festival was undoubtedly being introduced to the music of DJ Khabir, coming out of West Bengal (and as I subsequently discovered sitting adjacent to its burgeoning ‘Dek Bass’ scene). I was entirely unfamiliar with his work, and by way of introduction the festival showed a short film that was made by Rana Ghose, an old contact of mine. Rana and I had connected over ten years ago as he helped facilitate bringing Charanjit Singh over to Europe, where we hosted him at two parties in London and Glasgow.

Rana’s film, ‘Bass Boss’, introduces us to the unique sonic experimentations of Khobir, in which his mission is to make bass music with such destructive power that it actually hurts you. And by bass music, I mean music that only contains bass. It may have a smattering of raw percussive elements from time to time, the odd siren and vocal ‘DJ Khabir’ sample, but 99% of it is literally bass. And by ‘bass’, I mean BASS.

His set blew me away. Set up incredibly well by the film, which showed Khabir’s attempts to increase the intensity of the bass sound he could produce. He does this by working with local electricians to build soundsystems (see the picture above) with humungous bass bins and playback devices in which everything is rooted towards producing an overwhelming, destructive bass sound.

It was the purest distillation of the ‘hardcore continuum’ that I’d heard, no fucking around, just straight low end, relentless in its ability to punish you from start to finish. But, it was created with no knowledge of this Western musical canon - similar to Charanjit Singh ‘inventing’ acid house, this music was borne out of a local culture in isolation, without western influence.

Aided by Khabir’s menacingly serious demeanour on stage and having heard repeatedly on the film his intention to actually hurt anyone listening, and then witnessing kids literally passing out and being carried away from the dancefloor in the film, this was one of the most extreme musical experiences I’ve ever come across.

I’d place it up there with the late Maryanne Amarcher’s ‘third ear’ octagonal sound rooms, which I heard 20 odd years ago - not so much due to the bass, but the sheer loudness and intensity of that sound experience has stayed with me all this time.

Entering the dancefloor, you were hit with this wall of sound. Luckily I’d brought ear protection, as otherwise it would have been too much for my ear drums, but with protection on, what you heard was through the body. Relentless bass frequencies, trapping you within huge sine waves and primitive low frequency oscillations. After around ten minutes I started to discombobulate, after 15 I was slightly queasy, after 20 I had to leave the room and take a break only to be enticed back for more. There was practically no let up - the bass didn’t stop, there were no drops, breaks, build ups - just pure bass.

With caution, I’d encourage the more musical adventurous to seek out DJ Khabir and certainly the Bass Boss film, if you see it at a film festival or if it ever gets a general release.

Pic: Khabir, Rana and myself at the after party.

The following is taken from an interview with Rana, published on Resident Advisor last year:

"DJ Khabir extended the drop to an absurd conclusion," Ghose said. "He wasn't aware of any parallels with car stereo or bass subcultures abroad–it was entirely his own invention." Ghose compares Khabir’s performances to "using a divining rod to locate the breaking point of the human psyche through low-end frequencies."

Reflecting on the social and historical resonance of the Dek Bass movement, he added: "I don't think the state of West Bengal ever truly recovered psychologically from the devastation of the 1943 famine that Churchill oversaw, or the chronic economic malaise and unspoken trauma the region seems to present. In my experience, bass frequencies at that scale become a narcotic that forces you to exist in that exact moment alone. That past simply cannot exist. And maybe that's the point."

All this reminded me to re-visit the book ‘Sonic Warfare’ by Steve Goodman aka Kode9 (academic and founder of Hyperdub records). Its described as

‘An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe.’

He draws parallels from the use of sound within warfare to the various bass soundsystem cultures across the globe, to urban destinations in which ‘sound contributes to an immersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread’. When politicised, sound can be a weapon - used for crowd control, torture and within warfare itself.

He details how infrasound, or sub-20 Hz bass frequencies that are inaudible to the human ear, are capable of inducing bodily harm. Goodman talks about the vibratory “envelope of death,” where they “allegedly suffered sustained internal spasms as their organs hit critical resonance frequencies.” Ouch!

Infrasound devices generally require huge, heavy rigs to produce such powerful waves, which limit their practicality - and I’m not sure if DJ Khabir and other soundsystem architects from West Bengal to Jamaica have got there yet, but they intuitively understand the power they are playing with… which makes this music all the more dangerous, and exciting.

Tread with caution…

Plants Can Dance is back at our residential home, Hideout, in Hackney Wick, East London - 19th April.

We had a great one last month with the launch of Sunflowers (less than ten copies left if you’d like to grab one), with special guests Li Yilei and Luca. The event was curated as more of a concert/traditional gig than previous events, with no workshop and minimal talking with a focus on deep listening and that format worked well. Thanks to everyone who came and respected the environment we created :)

For our next event, we flip it back to the previous format, meaning it will be much more interactive! We’ll begin with a biosonification workshop, hosted by myself and Lamine from Repot (who’s back from his travels after missing the last one). We’ll fill the space with plants from his Repot plant shop and plug a range of biosonification devices into them to hear what sounds can be made. A biophilliacs wet dream…

We’ve partnered with Instruo and Modern Biology for this, so have plenty of Pocket Scions for you to play with.

We’ve also invited back Pierre Paslier (who runs the amazing non-plastic seaweed packaging business NotPla) who’ll be demonstrating his biosonification tape-loop experiments with his reel-to-reel machine and other experimental approaches to making music from nature.

We’ll then have two guest speakers - Sophia Shnapp, Music and sustainability advocate, who works with EarthPercent to highlight how the creative sector can play a meaningful role in driving environmental action and long-term change. Sophia has just delivered a TEDx talk in their Ibiza Summit, talking about the connection between Nature and Music and we’ll have an opportunity to hear that TED talk and then discuss it…

NATURE is an artist. And millions are already listening.

In a world searching for new ways to live in balance, music is quietly leading a shift, helping to retune how we value the living planet, and offering a blueprint for systems rooted in harmony.

In her recent TEDx talk, Sophia Shnapp shares a journey from global climate institutions to the cultural frontier: where music, storytelling, and collective experience are shaping a new relationship between people and planet.

At the heart of the talk:

@soundsright.earth — an initiative recognising Nature as an artist, with royalties flowing back to protect and restore ecosystems, developed with @museumfortheun

@earthpercent — founded by Brian Eno, mobilising the music industry for climate action

When culture shifts, policy follows.

A State Of Flo has been supporting Earth Percent since we started, so it’s fantastic to hear from Sophia and share the work it has been doing.

Our second guest speaker is Paul JJ Treichl is an Austrian designer, architect, and artist who works with living organisms. He explores the intersection between the built and natural environments and the living organisms that comprise them. His research and work touch on speculative futures and multi-species design through the lenses of education. His recent paper "The biota as pedagogy" proposes an approach to the education system that places local living organisms, ecosystems, and ecological relationships at the core of curriculum, rather than treating them as separate subjects.

Paul recently launched Feral Worlding a publication platform for those working across and beyond biodesign - practitioners, academics, independent researchers, students, artists, DIY experimenters, and the curious. A biannual, print-only magazine which engages in the critical conversations of those who are shaping the future of living systems with care, ethics, and creativity. FW was created to bridge the fragmented, often disconnected worlds of academic research, grassroots experimentation, speculative design, and collective inquiry.

We’ll be hearing from Paul about all these projects and will have some copies of Feral Worlding for you to check out too.

In amongst all that, we’ll also have time to listen to plant music from Lamine and my duel Modular Synth and Instruo Scion set ups - a perfect way to detach and wind down the weekend!

Rough timings

4pm-530pm - Biosonification Workshops with Brian, Lamine and Pierre

530-615pm - Paul JJ Treichl / Feral Worlding

645-730pm - Sophia Shnapp (TEDx talk + Q&A)

730pm - close Brian d’Souza and Lamine’s Plants Can Dance

Tickets on sale next week :)

Support A State Of Flo!

Supporters of A State Of Flo can listen back to the recording from the last Plants Can Dance 22nd Feb - the link is after the paywall below. Your support is most welcome - 10% goes to EarthPercent and the rest goes to supporting the release of new music on this platform. Supporters receive all music released on the label as a download, exclusive mixes and other content, some free vinyl and an Ambient Flo ‘zine.

Read more

Poster design by Chris Chadwell

We’re taking the band on tour!

Something clicked when playing with the band at the Jazz Cafe last year, I realised that presenting the music I make with the band is the best way of performing my 10 years plus of recorded music live. I’ve dabbled with many different formats over the years, from playing as a duo, to AV experiments, so solo live but none have realised my artistic vision as well as playing with a full live band.

In many ways, this makes sense - I work with a lot of musicians to put the music together, recording live sessions instead of using samples or cutting corners by being too ‘in the box’. I travel the world in order to do this, seeking interesting collaborations with artists using traditional instruments to create novel sounds and finding unique way to fuse the old and the new - rooted in a global story-telling narrative.

In this way, I can combine my core beliefs - that music has the power to bring us all closer together, and that by doing so language, cultural, political and other barriers that often prohibit our outlook in this regard can be quashed.

This theory was put to the test in India last month, where the band played at Nomads in Rajasthan, the new incarnation of the renowned Magnetic Fields Festival. We headlined the main stage of the Saturday night, and although we had a completely different line up of musicians to the Jazz Cafe the response was similar.

So I hope you can join us on the UK tour we’ve just announced, five dates in April and May and the tickets have just gone on sale.
TICKET LINKS

30th April - Leeds, Howard Assembly Rooms

w/ Moncaya

1st May - Bristol, Strange Brew

w/ Moncaya

2nd May - Manchester, Band On The Wall

w/ Bom Nation, Cervo (Banana Hill)

3rd May - Edinburgh, The Pitt

w/ Moncaya, Eclair Fifi, Lord of the Isles, Box Energy

16th May - London, Ronnie Scott’s Late Show

(My Birthday!)

The Line Up

I’m excited to be working with Moncaya who will also be providing her own live support at three of the shows. Coming out of Mexico, the singer-songwriter has an incredible voice and we’ve been working on some new tracks in my London studio recently. As well as support, she’ll be on vocal duties for the band.

Ziggy Funk (Guitar) and Cyrus Atkinson (Keys) will also be back after being part of various Auntie Flo line ups over the past few years. You’ll know Ziggy from his ecstatic guitar solo on Green City:

The line up will be completed by Chiminyo on drums. Resident at the legendary Ronnie Scott’s in London, he is a respected drummer and also experimentalist using drums as key triggers for his solo live work -

The Challenge

Let’s be realistic, touring in 2026 is hard. Making the maths on this tour work, bringing five people to five cities is an exercise of risk, faith and collective endeavour by everyone involved.

We’ll hire a big car and drive to the gigs ourselves, but there will be no tour bus so we’ll be hiring AirBnbs and calling in some favours. Multiply everything by five - meals, drinks etc.. let’s see how things come out in the wash. I’m certainly hoping not to lose £26,000 like Kate Nash (and the way this tour is being budgeted ensures this won’t be the case).

I’ve written about some of these challenges before:

Grassroots venues are still closing, although the steep decline where over 100 venues shut in 2023, the numbers were 30 between 2024 and 2025. However, over half are reporting making zero profits, so how sustainable the industry is remains to be seen.

What I’m certain of, is the collective experience of live music is something that will never die and I’m looking forward to putting this theory to the test during this tour.

I’m also excited to be touring with these fantastic musicians and connecting with you all at the gigs - IT WILL BE JOYOUS!

Spread The Word

Please help us spread the word if you are reading this and know anyone in the cities we are going to!

Sharing organically means we beat the social media algorithms that create this needless barrier and constant place of frustration.

Share

OTHER DATES:

Here are some other dates for your diary, including the next Plants Can Dance 19th April, which we’ll announce next week. More TBA.

14.3.26 - Auntie Flo DJ at Casa Capitao, Lisbon, Portugal

28.3.26 - Auntie Flo DJ at Kater Berlin, Germany

2.4.26 - Plants Can Dance, Six Senses, London

19.4.26 - Plants Can Dance, Hideout, London

30.4.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Leeds

1.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Bristol

2.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Manchester

3.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Edinburgh

16.5.26 - Auntie Flo Live Band, Ronnie Scott’s, London

23.5.26 - Auntie Flo DJ, Grow Hackney, London

30.5.26 - Brian d’Souza live at Watching Trees UK

19.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Solstice, Cornwall

20.6.26 - Auntie Flo DJ, Wildwood UK

21.6.26 - Plants Can Dance, Wildwood UK

Whilst scrolling a clip of Carl Craig being interviewed came up (which I now can’t seem to find!) where he was talking about how the age of the long track is over, an age that, in dance music terms at least, he helped to shape: Check his catalogue of classic tracks such as his jazzy broken beat project Innerzone Orchestra - ‘Bug In The Bass Bin’ and also epic remixes as ‘C2’ such as ‘Like A Child’ by Junior Boys and ‘Revelee’ by Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, which in part defined a minimal style of tech house that became popular in the mid 2000s.

These tracks all run to over 10 mins and I’m a massive fan of Craig’s clever use of subtle production tweaks, his patience in letting the sounds unfold and his use of space to create the ultimate drama within the music. He always manages to find an endless groove that locks you in, which is key to enducing that transcendental state (of flow) which we all crave, rewarding you as the track builds over a longer-than-average time span.

Good things come to those that wait, and it’s as much about the song as your ability to listen to it. Patient Listening I called it:

The Battle For Attention

In this day and age, there is a battle for attention: Craig was pointing out in the interview that creating these long tracks in the age of TikTok and Spotify isn’t viable as the average listener just doesn’t have the attention span for it.

BTW. I met someone recently who before uploading their track to Spotify chopped it into six 30-second chunks in order to multiply royalties by 6 after discovering that 30 seconds of listening time constitutes one play! An interesting example of how formats/platforms change the artform…

We live in skip culture which has led to listeners craving the new and the next: just skip to the drop and move on, the Boiler Room highlights reel now seem to make or break a DJs career, not their carefully crafted music.

Long tracks buck this trend - you are rewarded for dedicating your attention to listening from start to finish. In the same way you can fall in love with an album that takes you on a journey, you can fall deeply into a sonic world that an artist creates within a ten minute song, with the added time potentially delivering a richer story than a 30 second social media trailer or 3 minute spotify ‘radio edit’.

I’ve been a long advocate in long tracks, with my Rainfall On Red Earth from ten years ago clocking 16 mins:

And more recently having bigger success with the extended version of Green City (15 mins) than the radio edit:

And my most recent remixes of Doe Paoro (11 and 9 mins):

Looking back at some of my all time favourite pieces of music, a lot falls into this category, and cover a range of genres. So allow me to share with you a list of incredible long songs.

My Favourite Long Songs

The Afrobeat master Fela Kuti’s music often went for over 15 mins, here’s 17 mins of Sorrow, Tears and Blood:

On the more ambient side you have Terry Riley (and the other minimalists) often using an entire album for one or two songs (40 mins total):

Or how about Pauline Oliveros’ original ‘Deep Listening’ album (that lead to her influential and very trendy practise of the same name)? Lear comes in at 24 mins:

Then there’s my dance music hero Ricardo Villalobos (who I’ve written about here) -

Ricardo has countless tracks over 15 minutes long:

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past month revisiting Joanna Newsom’s epic ‘Yss’ album from 2016. I think it’s one of the best albums ever made - I’ve never heard anything like it. ‘Only Skin’ clocks 16 mins and always gives you something new on every listen.

Perhaps the best definition of a long track for the dancefloor is the already-classic ‘Time’ by Pachanga Boys. It’s strength is in it’s simplicity, and it certainly influenced by Carl Craig. Play this at the right time on the dancefloor and you enter a new world:

The lyrics perhaps sum this whole article up “Lost Track of Time…”Isn’t that what we all want from music?

Do you have any other examples of long tracks you love ? please share

Leave a comment

My album dedicated to the Sunflower is out now on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By. Every physical purchase comes with a beautiful yellow tape cassette, a packet of sunflower seeds and some additional prints, as well as the digital download/album stream via the Bandcamp app.

BUY NOW

Launch Party 22nd Feb

For those in London, please come to our album launch party in Hackney Wick this Sunday: TICKETS HERE.

4pm start with a live set from Li Yilei, live performance of ‘sunflowers’ by Brian d’Souza and DJ support from Luca (E2-E8 records)

Track by Track Recordings:

These videos show the tracks as I recorded them, basically doing the whole thing in one take, in one day.

You can see how much/little I interacted with the sounds and the limited editing I did post recording (mainly to fit the tracks onto the required cassette length). Apologies, I forgot to film ‘Hector’s Sunflower’.

The modules I used were: Instruo Scion, Harmonaig, LFO, Mutable Instruments Plaits (x2), Beads, Rings, Clouds, a Filter, Eventide H9 FX.

Read more about how I made it here:

1. Signs of Life

   Sparse bleeps of a life force being birthed into this world from seeds in soil

2. Germination

   An entity starts to come together, with a stalk now being visible and harmonic layers being heard

3. Irrigatio

   Water gives life and the composition starts to flourish, where you can hear the water supporting life in the track

4. Heliotropism

   Light helps growth, with the sunflower physically turning towards the light source as if it were dancing to a single strobe on a dance floor of soil. This track is about movement and vitality!

5. Stand Tall

   With the stalk now becoming stronger, it can support the full flower which starts to pop with audible bursts representing the head opening and petals finally being visible

6. Sunshine, Freedom and a Little Flower

   The full sunflower in all it’s glory is born, with the full symphony now being created, bringing together the sounds heard so far into a full composition - a true representation of the sunflower in all its glory

My latest exploration into biosonification is a new album entitled ‘Sunflowers’. It will be released next week on the fantastic label Music To Watch Seeds Grow By on tape cassette and digital download. We collaborated last year on one of my Plants Can Dance events and they asked me to contribute to their 2026 series of tape albums, with my Sunflowers album kicking things off.

BUY the limited run of beautiful cassette tapes- you even get a bonus pack of seeds!

An obvious direction for me to take was to record some of my bioelectrical musical experiments, using realtime electrical data of plants and mushrooms as a means of music composition. A State of Flo is all about seeking connections to the natural world through music, and Plants Can Dance has been exploring a variety of means of doing this over the past few years.

For Sunflowers, my son was gifted some seeds at his school and was excited to plant them and then see them birth a stem and then flower last summer.

He took the plant pot home and we started to experiment with connecting it to firstly the PlantWave to hear if it made sounds.

It was fun to watch the sunflower grow over a period of a few months, hearing the different ‘music’ via the PlantWave app everytime we ‘plugged’ it in.

Biosonification - How does it work?

At this point, it’s important to explain that the devices I use such as the PlantWave or the Scion (from Instruo) are outputting a stream of data from mostly the water content within the plant. They work using similar principles to the Galvanic Skin Response, which is the physiological effect that the lie detector is based on. It measures increases in sweat molecules if someone is lying.

These devices measure surface conductivity and have each company has devised a formula that maps the fluctuations of electrical voltage changes onto a MIDI map of musical notes i.e. keys on the keyboard. In this way, we able to simply ‘sonify’ the data that is collected in realtime.

If the plant is well watered, more data is produced and you hear a a greater volume and variety of notes being played. The video shows the impact of watering and lead to the creation of the ‘Irragatio’ track on the album.

One common confusion that may need some clarification is the difference between picking up the electrical data from surface conductivity as I’ve explained above versus the electrical signalling that plants do to interact with their environment as a means of interspecies communication. This, as I’ve discovered over the past few years, is the source of some controversy, as opens up the idea of varying levels of plant intelligence.

Do plants, through their signalling (known as ‘action potentials’) have sentience, which allows them to communicate to other flora and fauna in their ecosystem using their electrical output? This is the source of debate in the botany world, and if you are interested in delving deeper I’d highly recommend The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger to learn more. She has a great chapter on another means of plant communication through chemical signalling, which has some similarities to electrical signalling above.

What I’m doing here, and what devices such as PlantWave, Scion, Playtronica have made accessible to all, is not necessarily this. These devices are a fantastic way to enter into a world of biosonification, and artistically I’ve found them to be a freeing way of connecting with the natural world to make music inspired by plants and fungi.

As I’ve witnessed first hand, using music as a medium to ‘listen’ to something natural presents a paradigm shift - allowing audiences to potentially reframe their understanding of the living world - with plants and fungi a crucial part of our interconnected, multi-species planetary ecosystem that we should respect and view more as a symbiosis rather than hierarchy.

I’ve watched kids and pensioners and everyone in between be wowed by this, and gain a lot of joy from ‘listening’ to plants and making music in this way: away from standard tempos, verse/chorus structures and common tunings.

Making the Sunflower Album

The video below shows how I made the album in the studio. All tracks were recorded in the same day, and I tried to embody the life cycle of the sunflower that I’d witnessed in chronological order in the album. It starts very sparsely, with the seeds starting to take root, and then start to flourish with the additional of light and water adding more layers to the compositions before ending up as a fuller symphony of interweaving frequencies where the sunflower stands tall and proud, in all its majesty.

Using a modular synth is a perfect way to achieve this, with each patch cable adding an additional sonic layer - in my head this was akin to each leaf or petal appearing on the flower.

The track titles give you a sense of this progression across the album:

A1. Signs Of Life

A2. Germination

A3. Irrigation

A4. Heliotropism

A5. Stand Tall

B2. Sunshine, Freedom, and a Little Flower

B3. Hector’s Sunflower

Why Sunflowers?

I’ve discovered a lot about sunflowers working on this album: most interestingly, that they are social beings!

When a high-nutrient patch of soil is found halfway between two sunflowers, they would place their roots elsewhere in order to avoid any competitive fight: co-existence for sunflowers is paramount, a stronger urge than dominating the competition.

By doing this, they are demonstrating a high degree of sensitivity to their social environment - which is a contrary perspective to classic Darwinian survival of the fitness thinking, a completely different narrative starts to emerge - one of evolutionary change above all else, rather than competition and dominance.

Research by James F Cahill and Megan K. Ljubotina

Taken from The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger chap 9

Launch Party - 22nd of Feb at Hideout, Hackney Wick, London

Please join us on the 22nd for the launch party!

We’ve invited the incredible Chinese sound artist and ambient musician Li Yilei to perform, and I’ll be doing a live rendition of the sunflower album (if I can get hold of a sunflower at this time of year!).

We’ll have some cassettes of the album and seeds to sell too - so you can try making your own album in this way too!

Early Bird tickets are still available here

Brian d’Souza - Sunflowers will be released 17th Feb on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By

The latest release on A State of Flo is a collaborative EP between myself under my Auntie Flo alias and Costa Rica-based singer-songwriter Sonia Kreitzer aka Doe Paoro. Sonia got in touch last year and asked if I’d like to remix ‘Teach Us Of Endings’ from her recent album ‘Living Through Collapse’.

I was blown away by the parts she sent over: beautifully recorded instrumentation, percussion and vocals, which gave me building blocks that were a joy to work with. I made a standard radio-friendly remix, which will be released next month, but I had so much fun dubbing them out in the studio that I ended up making a 12 minute version - allowing all the part to breathe.

I’m going to sound hypocritical here, as I spend a lot of time advocating for adopting original practises in the creative/music-making process - try not be derivative, break the formula, don’t follow the trends of the day.

However, if there was a formula at work here, it would be very much in the mould of my 2024 track Green City:

• Super long extended version that could go on forever (imo)

• Takes ages for the vocal to drop

• A killer Ziggy Funk guitar part

• Snare Rolls to build the excitement

• Hypnotic CZ5000 Kalimba/Marimba groove

Check Check Check. The main point is, I’ve perhaps found a compositional sweet spot where music exists in a continuous flow, ensures you get fully locked in and builds to reach a state of maximum joy by the end. Just wait and wait for those lush strings to come in!

Does it work for you as well as it does for me?

Maya on the flip is in a similar mould but much moodier - running to 9 mins, it is carried by a Ziggy Funk bassline and some killer percussion. I added analogue synth washes that build until the glorious flute parts enter the fray. To me, it sounds much more Levantine or Middle Eastern - echoes of music by Insanlar/Ricardo Villalobos, Khidja, Red Axes and played by the likes of Ivan Smagghe or Vladimir Ivkovic.

Release Day: Bandcamp Exclusive

I’m going to do an experiment with this release - it is available to buy now on vinyl via my Bandcamp exclusively. I’ve pressed 300 copies on Orange vinyl and they look and sound amazing.

If they all go, perhaps I’ll do another pressing but if not, I’ll work with a distributor to get them into the record shops. I’m all up for supporting the record shops but the costs are so high for vinyl selling direct is the only realistic way of breaking even on a 300 press.

So please, if you want a copy go buy one today on Bandcamp Day (where they don’t take their usual cut).

Support A State Of Flo

You can also get the release by subscribing to A State Of Flo. Super supporters already got their copies of the vinyl in the post this week, and Paid Supporters got their digital copies too. Subscribing gets you everything the label has put out, and I’ll through some vinyl and a ‘zine in the post for you too.

Subscribe now

Birds Of Paradise Repress and Remixes

In case you missed it, Birds Of Paradise was repressed and I have around 40 copies left.

Buying the record gets you the full selection of remixes:

Plants Can Dance: 22nd February

JOIN US FOR THE LAUNCH OF ‘SUNFLOWERS’ on MUSIC TO WATCH SEEDS GROW BY.

TICKETS

Up for a dance? Auntie Flo DJs in London 21st FEB

TICKETS

I’m generally not too fussed about remixes: I enjoy making them myself, but never felt a massive urge to hear another producers take on my work. However, as A State Of Flo is a solo operation, I thought that pulling in a few favours to get some remixes would be a good way to build bridges with adjacent producers and hopefully be a way of bringing some if their audiences into my little ecosystem. This package came together quite quickly and I’m pleased with the results. Mostly they are swaps, so look out for my remixes of Los Pulpitos and Orion Agassi…

First up, Sean Johnston is a DJ I’ve admired for a while and his productions as Hardway Bros are always work checking. I suspect he’s best know for sailing the A Love From Outer Space ship solo, post-Andrew Weatherall (RIP), and looks like he’s doing an excellent job of maintaining its core ethos.

I noticed Sean being a fan of my work a couple of years ago. Praise Him was one of his tunes of the 2024, and he’s been known to play Green City and others out at A Love From Outer Space.

His remix of Ceibo is definitely a tune I could hear on the ALFOS dancefloor - deep, chuggy, acidy… the type of track you want to hear whilst lost amongst an over zealous smoke machine in the middle of the dancefloor.

Ruf Dug and I must be about the same age, and I’ve always admired his irreverent style. There is some affinity between the slightly maturer clubbing scenes of Glasgow and Manchester that I guess we both come from, and we’ve crossed paths several times over the years.

His remix is typically wonky, an original take that comes across as a fun analogue studio jam, with many ideas thrown into the mix but maintaining a flow and potency for the dancefloor.

It’s been quite amusing that he keeps popping up on my DJ promo mailer, championing his own work! ‘Ruf Dug is a g’ indeed!

Los Pulpitos is a new group created by Dirk Leyers (ex-Closer Musik w/ Matias Aguayo and Africaine 808) and Rafael from Dengue Dengue Dengue. Back in my Highlife days, we worked with Africaine 808 a fair bit, swapping remixes and guest appearances in Berlin and Glasgow.

I always check everything Dengue Dengue Dengue put out, their production is superlative and bring a credible punch to the slow-mo south american modern-cumbia sound.

Los Pulpitos sound what you might expect - dark, dubby and made-for-the-club, with interesting rhythms that you can’t necessary place in any one genre. Check out their forthcoming album on Crammed Discs.

Orion Agassi is from Bilbao and we were introduced to each other by Huntleys and Palmers Andrew Thomson, who has this uncanny knack of finding incredible tunes from otherwise unknown producers. Agassi’s first Ep was exactly that, and remains one of my most played collection of dancefloor songs in the past few years. And check out his recent 5 year label compilation, which I did this remix for:

Agassi reached out to me when I started A State Of Flo and he’s been mastering most of the records the label has put out. He’s super prolific: I asked him to do a remix one evening and by 4am the next day it was done!

These remixes accompany a repress of the Birds Of Paradise album. We sold the first pressing of 300 copies fairly quickly, so hoping the next press of 200 will go too.

I have 50 up for sale exclusively on Bandcamp right now, before they go into the shops and streaming services next week.

Grab yours here:

NB. Reminder that 10% of all purchases is donated to Earth Percent.

FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS - You get a free download link to the remixes and album after the paywall.

Subscribe now

Read more

One of the takeaways from 2025 is that things take time to build. I started A State Of Flo in Jan 2024 and it feels like only now, two years later, I’m seeing things beginning to flower from seeds planted two years ago (excuse the pun). I haven’t analysed this in great detail but there is a growing sense of things coming together as I’ve kept up the consistency of my creative output - releases, gigs, substack newsletters and social media posts.

As a result, I’m finding opportunities coming through - be them gigs, commissions, collaborations, talks, workshops or whatever. So my advice to anyone in a similar position is: play the long game, you might not get an immediate response but consistently creating (whilst ensuring the quality doesn’t dip) will eventually get noticed.

Moving into 2026, I have three large album projects lined up, a few big commissions which are waiting on funding, the launch of our long awaited mobile app ‘Soniferous’ (click the link to register for early access) and a number of remixes/collaborations and more in the works. It’s an exciting time, and certainly would not have been possible at any point in the past two years.

A change this year is letting my followers into my process in the studio and elsewhere via Instagram. I’ve decided to embrace it, with more reels spoken to camera. Follow here to have a look.

Birds Of Paradise Remixes

I’m excited to share some activity lined up for this year, starting with the first release on the label. I reached out a bunch of DJs and producers who I’ve looked up to to remix tracks from Birds Of Paradise: Sean Johnston (as Hardway Bros) from A Love From Outer Space, Manchester’s Ruf Dug (NTS / Rhythm Section), Los Pulpitos (a new collaboration signed to Crammed Discs between Closer Musik’s Dirk Leyers and Rafael from Dengue Dengue Dengue), Bilbao’s Orion Agassi (who masters a lot of the music on the label) and also added a new version of EarthNRG from myself, inspired by a conversation we had during the album launch Bandcamp Listening Party.

My approach was to call upon people I’ve connected with over the years, and who have who have recently played or complimented my music. Most notably, Sean Johnston became an early supporter of the label, which gave me a big boost - his support of ‘Praise Him’ from 2024 opened the Auntie Flo name up to his dedicated follower base.

The remix package will now be included in a freshly re-pressed vinyl version of the album where the album download will include the remixes. The first pressing sold out so if you missed out, order your copy now (they will be shipped by the end of the month)

Auntie Flo x Doe Paoro

Costa Rica-based singer-songwriter Doe Paoro asked me to remix ‘Teach Us Of Endings’, one of the singles from her recent album, ‘Living Through Collapse’. I had so much fun with the recordings that we agreed I’d develop this into an EP, creating two extended versions - Green City style - and that I’d press on limited orange vinyl on A State Of Flo.

I can’t wait to share these extended balearic bombs.. coming next month.

Brian d’Souza - Sunflowers + Plants Can Dance 22nd Feb with Li Yihae

Last year, Plants Can Dance collaborated with the cassette label ‘Music To Watch Seeds Grow By’ at our September event in London, featuring two of their artists Stella Z and Lapalace. I was subsequently asked to create an album for their second series of releases kicking off this year. I’m honoured to kick off the series with ‘Sunflowers’ and album which tracks a sunflowers life cycle using biosonification of biodata from a sunflower to inspire the album.

It will be released on 17th Feb. Pre-Order the album here. With the cassette you also get a packet of sunflower seeds!

We’re hosting a launch party at the first Plants Can Dance of the year, at Hideout, London Sunday 22nd Feb. It will featured a live rendition of the Sunflower album and a live set from another ‘Seeds’ artist lined up for 2026, the renowned Chinese ambient musician- Li Yilei. If you are unfamiliar, listen to this incredible album ‘Nonage’ from last year:

Tickets can be purchased here:

DICE

RA

Eventbrite

We’re presenting this event as more of an ambient concert, just to change up the format (plus Lamine can’t make this one). So think beanbags on the floor, an afternoon of deep listening and still-ness surrounded by plants.

Brian d’Souza x Ru Earl - Deep Listening at the Turner Gallery

I did a Plants Can Dance performance at Shai Space in south London last year, and was pleased when they asked me to be part of their Turner Gallery takeover in Margate on 7th Feb. I was giving an open brief and opportunity to collaborate with visual artist Ru Earl. Our project has come together really quickly, with Rupert’s analogue light box visuals and great match for my cascading arpeggios on the modular, exploring psychedelic states of consciousness. Here’s a little sneak peek:

TICKETS

Auntie Flo Live band at Magnetic Fields Nomads, Rajasthan India

I’ve toured India four or five times and always had Magnetic Fields festival on my bucket list. In December, they reached out and asked if I could bring the Auntie Flo band over, they’d seen the footage of our Jazz Cafe gig and loved it.

So social media does work! Catch us on 14th Feb - visa permitting I’ll be joined by Ambasa Mandela from Kenya to sing Green City and Mame N’Diack from Senegal for Mame’s Story and others.

Auntie Flo DJ set at Fox + Firkin 21st Feb 2026

I’m a DJ at heart and excited to have an opportunity to DANCE at this London event. I’ve got so many new dance floor tracks to play - come down for a boogie. Excited to be joined by Sarah tonin too, who is a resident at Bill Brewster’s Low Life parties.

Here’s a recent DJ mix I did to get you in the mood:

TICKETS

Auntie Flo remix of Wake Up Baby by Isa Gordon & Tony Morris

I’m a mega Tony Morris fan and it was fantastic to join up with my og Glasgow crew Huntleys + Palmers to put together this remix package (coming soon).

Auntie Flo ‘Mycelia’ on Permanent Vacation’s Still Motion ambient Compilation

I honestly have no memory of making this song (!) so was pleasantly surprised when Benji from Permanent Vacation records told me it came out this week as part of the ‘Still Motion’ compilation

Alex Horne aka Fine Grains Records (1982-2025)

Finally a special mention to one of my best friends Alex Horne who sadly passed away on 20th December after a 6 year battle with cancer. Alex and I met at university 20+ years ago and connected over music, football and a lust for life. He quietly battled this horrendous illness, achieving more in the past six years that many do in a life time.

I was honoured to be asked to say a few words at his funeral last week and connect with his closest friends and family over the past few months. His label put out some amazing music, not least the Cain album from last year, which was one of my favourites.

I’m running the London Landmarks Half Marathon on April in his memory, raising money for Momentum Cancer Charity. If you’d like to donate, please follow this LINK

2025 was the second year of A State of Flo records, a year when I established more of a workflow for the label and built on the foundations laid in 2024. I defined the label as striving to ‘connect the natural world with the electronic music one’ and this mission statement helped provide a direction that covers all bases, with plenty of room to explore.

Times are tough out there, and the biggest changes in the music industry seem to be negative: vinyl sales are challenging, postage costs are up, streaming numbers are still not translating into sustainable income, touring is harder than ever, clubs and venues are closing, social media seems less impactful and more fragmented as a promotion tool, AI music has entered music synch and publishing in a big way and we are no further from establishing how the independent music industry can adjust the game to play by its own rules.

Regardless of these challenges, which one could argue aren’t anything really new, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the creative outlet and artistic freedom that running my own label gives me. Throughout the year I’ve had to remind myself about the article I wrote last year entitled Coping Strategies for Creatives - that the gauntlet of birthing creative projects into the world is always going to be subject to criticism, non-appreciation or worst still, being completely blanked - and the joy of being creative is the point.

In the face of big tech and AI, the artisanal and fundamentally human endeavour of running a small label is all too important - the question is can one attract a big enough niche audience to self-sustain ones endeavours?

As Kai Tempest eloquently put it in a recent interview: ‘To be creative is the point, it is medicine’. I’d then say that to break even is the next objective, a signifier that there is some value in your creative output judged by the market.

Making a living from purely releasing music? - I’m still none the wiser as to how that could be feasible, but a combination of releases, gigs, syncs and everything else might just get you there.

Here are some thoughts from this time last year:

As was the case last year, the following is a transparent insight into how the label has performed over the course of year. I’ve decided to put the financial figures behind a paywall, so if you’d like to see them - please subscribe. Doing so will grant you downloads of all releases on the label and early access to all the new music I’ve got lined up for next year.

Subscribe now

A State Of Flo 2025

I put out six releases this year - digital club remixes of 2024’s Auntie Flo album In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free) with a fourth repress of Green City, an album of ambient sea sounds form Scotland ‘Uisge Beatha’, ‘Black Beacon’, an album of recordings made in ex-military base Orford Ness and two Auntie Flo singles + album Bird’s Of Paradise, and a little Bandcamp-only charity release.

In amongst that, I launched Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms ‘Sing’) event series promoting the connection between nature and music through biosonification, modular synthesis, deep listening and field recording.

I performed live at Auntie Flo - trying various iterations from a live AV show, solo live and full live band.

One of my highlights was taking 12 people on a soundwalk to Orford Ness, where the Black Beacon album was made. It was a glorious day and everyone bonded well as a group.

Gigs in 2024: ~18 (DJ/Live gigs, Plants Can Dance workshops, panel talks etc)

Gigs in 2025: ~51 (DJ/Live gigs, Plants Can Dance workshops, panel talks etc)

So things have massively increased on the gig front - hopefully a result of laying the ground work in 2024 and seeing the benefits in 2025. I have more capacity in 2026, and things are looking to at least match 2025 at this moment. However, there is still a glass ceiling which seems to stop me from being booked at the top tier festivals that were regularly booking me prior to COVID-19 (the likes of We Out Here, Love International, Lost Village remain interested but perhaps not quite ready - let’s see).

The challenge has been the classic one - being asked to promote gigs I’ve been booked for due to low pre-sales. I had one gig cancel this year due to this and selling tickets for some of my own shows was a struggle. The Jazz Cafe turned out to be a highlight of the year but it took a mammoth effort to bring in a very-close-to-sell-out audience of 400 people. I wrote about some of these challenges here

Promotion

Running the record label on Substack was definitely the right move and the numbers of free subscribers have steadily risen over the course of the year (~1000 new subs in 12 months). I’m still working out the paid tier as using it to directly email paid subscribers hasn’t been a massive success. However, I appreciate anyone subscribing and it does help facilitate new releases and other activity - plus 10% goes to Earth Percent charity.

Press: I worked with Becca at Nightswim again for the PR campaign around Birds Of Paradise. I think she does a great job of getting it into print and online media, the challenge is that those outlets are declining and my sense is the reach they have is getting smaller. Birds Of Paradise was no 5 in the albums of the year on Disco Pogo’s list - but not really seen on other major lists. It shows that as ever, you are at the mercy of individual journalists, and their limited capacity to listen to an ever increasing amount of music that is released.

Just today, 100,000 tracks will be uploaded to Spotify - how do you cut through that noise?

Social Media: I’ve just hit 13k followers on Instagram but the reach and like count seems to be reduced from what it was. I’m trying to read into why this is - collaborative posts don’t seem to work and perhaps their lower reach make it more difficult for follow up solo posts to beat the algorithm. Any social media expert will say ‘consistency is the key’ and my output is far from it - so perhaps I need to try a new approach, simple videos that push the music/hardware side in a more conversational style and leave the promotional focus aside.

Facebook remains fairly consistent and I have to remind myself to post on there as I barely check it. Although for my demographic of older music heads, it is still alive and kicking.

I’ll put Spotify in social media/promotion, as it really should be viewed as a shop window rather than a sales channel.

These numbers are pretty much double what I did last year. Last year I complained that my numbers were only up 5% from the previous year - so this large increase shows that it take time for any impact to be measured.

Charity

My commitment with the label is to donate 10% of income to Brian Eno’s Earth Percent. I’m pleased to say I’ve been able to achieve that and have donated £1505.78 over the past year (with a final quarter to add just after the tax year completes). I’ve also donate over £400 to the Brains Trust in the aftermath of the passing of JD Twitch from Optimo.

Objectives going into 2026:

• Can I press 500 copies of vinyl rather than 200/300 - this is where the profit is (but higher risk!)

• Sell more direct via Bandcamp (and esp on Bandcamp days)

• Continue to use Spotify and streaming platforms as a shop window but limit releases so they don’t get everything

• Gig Gig Gig! IRL experiences are incredible as ever and despite the stress of selling tickets they are worth it. And you can sell a lot of merch in the process

• Explore new formats and smaller events (such as SoundWalks) to get to know your audience personally. Watch out for our new label app coming in 2026 too

• Remember to thing take time, the foundations I laid in 2024 started to show signs of making their mark one year on. Feedback is often a slow burn, not as instant as you’d like

• Be relentless - obviously you need to strike a balance but releasing something every couple of months seems to be a good target rate

OK, here are the sales figures, if you’d like to know more please subscribe. If you can’t afford this, please email me on brian@astateofflo.com - I’d be happy to share the numbers and pass on any advice if you are looking into self-releasing yourself.

If not, thanks for reading and supporting A State Of Flo. Tons more releases and cool stuff are lined up for next year. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Subscribe now

Read more

What started as a lockdown commission to make a piece of music inspired by vertical farming, has grown organically (!) over the last five years into the event series Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms ‘Sing’). The level of interest in plant and fungi-inspired music indicates a few things, but most pertinently that something changed for a lot of us during this period: we felt a deeper yearning to connect with the natural world.

For me, being locked down was a claustrophobic experience. I’d been flying around as a touring DJ most weekends, to the point of being close to burn out. Lockdown enforced the sabbatical I’d needed and my attention turned from collaborating with musicians around the world to collaborating with Mother Nature, who’s magic I started to find everywhere I looked.

I’d always used field recordings in my music, but lockdown inspired me to transform my field recording practise, upgrading from a basic iPhone recorder to an array of microphones recommended courtesy of the renowned recordist Chris Watson (via a four day CAMP course). Getting out into my local parks including the vast Alexandra Palace helped me to listen deeply, to peel back layers of the soundscape: I began to be able to identify individual bird calls, to notice the changing on the seasons. I became interested in different listening practises, in particular Deep Listening courtesy of Pauline Oliveros and took a deep dive into meditation.

Once the lockdown started to ease, the anthrophony reared back into life: cars, planes, sirens all overwhelmed the beautiful biophony I’d been listening to as urban life roared back into gear. As a field recordist (now being commissioned to capture this biophony for a number of projects), this became a frustrating process - getting up at 3am to record outside out of most flight paths was fun but unsustainable.

Electricity and Biosonification

It was around this time that I started to see viral videos from PlantWave and others. They were advertising devices that offered a different way of connecting with the natural world and making music through ‘electrical signals’. I thought it looked pretty gimmicky but bought one of the early devices and this started my exploration into the world of biosonification.

PlantWave works by completing an electrical circuit and measuring the small fluctuations in electrical current that is being made by whatever you connect them to. As per the name, connecting to plants work very well and the accompanying PlantWave app allows you to choose from a bunch of sound libraries to create a generative soundscape from this real-time ‘plant data’. As a musician, the best thing about PlantWave was the ability to capture the raw data from whatever you plugged into - the MIDI notes - and this could be used as the bedrock for my own nature-inspired compositions.

As a non-scientist, the world of bioelectricity and electricity in general was pretty novel to me, but entirely fascinating. I’ve recently been reading ‘We Are Electric’ by Sally Adee, and in it she documents how the wonder of electricity has been a much-debated and disputed topic for over 300 years, and that the importance of the ‘electrome’ in everything alive today undermined and placed in the shadows compared to the micro-biome and DNA.

As a musician, the greatest thing around working with PlantWave was it solved my immediate frustration with field recording: I could compose with nature using MIDI data rather than sound data. I was still dubious as to what was producing the data and what it told us, if anything, about the state of the plant but from the point of view of making music and art with nature, any data was enough. I viewed my job as a ‘translator’ - to take the data and then create a kind of sonic ecosystem or ‘ecology of sound’ using my modular synth to embody the plant (or fungi) as best as I could compositionally.

As an artist, this was creatively freeing - I didn’t need to think about the notes or the timings, I could compose with this ‘natural data’ outside of the standard tunings, regularity of the metronome and other standard production techniques. This was revelatory - I could make nature-inspired compositions that tuned audiences into the living world that was all around us, with the hope that by doing so, we would start to think about life in symbiosis and perhaps even ways to protect our fragile planetery ecosystem.

Reading ‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoe Schlager was another moment of insight: in another controversial field of research for the science community, why plants conduct bioelectricity (and emit chemicals too) is a fascinating thing to think about - are we on the cusp of discovering a new language, new realms of plants communication, even plant consciousness?!

What’s in a name?

This year, Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms ‘Sing’) was born. The name was split into two - first because I’d learned that plants and fungi and very different species and need to be categorised separately. Secondly because plants can dance - this is summed up by the quote from Schlanger’s The Light Eaters book:

Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a liveable future.

So, plants are dancing - just in slow motion, imperceivable to the human eye. To me, this is the most interesting thing about making art inspired by nature - it challenges you to submit to a totally different time plane.

Mushrooms (obviously) aren’t actually singing via vocalisations or anything similar to the human voice, but they are singing metaphorically - as part of the wider mycelium network and the Wood Wide Web. Sometimes harmoniously, sometime not, but like plants: always growing, probing and seeking ways of supporting life on this planet.

For subscribers, read on to find out how different approaches have led to some competing points of view…

Subscribe now

Read more

I spoke on a panel last night entitled ‘Human Curation versus AI’ alongside BBC6 radio host Jamz Supernova and Josh Mason from the hugely popular instagram blog account Somewhere Soul, hosted by Tim Garcia and Tina Edwards for KEF Loudspeakers.

It’s a topic that’s been close to my heart for a while. For 17/18 years, I ran a music curation company, Open Ear Music, and we made it our mission to push human curation as the best way to serve our clients, which included bars, restaurant, shops, gyms and workspaces. The definition of curation evolved over time, when we started in 2006/2007, the battle was to prove that curation of music outside of the mainstream pop charts could provide value for the businesses we worked with and their customers, whereas latterly it became more of a numbers game.

We were massive believers in the brilliance of independent music, and wanted to use the places we worked with as spaces of music discovery, at the same time helping the businesses carve out a unique sonic identity rather than playing the same stuff that their neighbours and competitors did.

We pushed to make this more of a foreground experience - calling it ‘playlists with personality’ and banning calling it ‘background music’. Our slogan was ‘unlike your eyes, your ears are always open’ - as the music we hear will always illicit some sort of emotional, behavioural or physiological response. The ears don’t blink after all.

Curation, done by humans was key and our small team had hungry ears - at our peak I was probably listening to over 200-300 songs every day, keeping on top of all the best new releases from a range of our independent label partners - our library topped 250,000 songs and was all killer, no filler.

As time progressed, being a curator evolved: streaming dramatically and exponentially increasing supply to an overwhelming amount - currently 100,000 song are uploaded daily - that’s 36.5million new songs per year. The ease of access to the world’s music via streaming also turned the average listener into curators too, more likely to personalise their own playlists - genres and eras became fractured and it became normalised for one to like ‘everything’ although technically that was impossible.

Overadundance of music created the need for better filters and AI became a necessary tool. No human could keep on top of the sheer volume of music that is now being released.

Now, with AI generated music here and rapidly expanding, curation is faced with its next evolution - is it important to create a distinction between AI music and Human music? Maybe we’re already too late, with AI music currently topping the country charts in the US and only 3% of people recently surveyed in Deezer able to tell the difference.

I joked with my friends that I make human music for the 3%.

The panel concluded with a call to arms: let’s not lose sight of the precociousness of music created by humans: the emotional, social and cultural connections that it brings. Let’s think about splitting the definitions of music between songs that are purely functional - music which serves us as a utility gushing through internet browsers versus music that contains more meaning, as an cultural artefact, as a pioneering step forward, and as art itself.

Music in Danger of becoming Extinct

With the sheer scale of this musical oversupply in mind, it’s easy to forget the scarcity that we were very recently faced with. The need not to ‘sleep’ on a release otherwise it would sell out, or where releases that only exist on physical media formats.

Earlier this year, I spent a week in Goa to perform at the incredible Sultry Mist Festival. I’ve been to Goa a few times before but never managed to buy any records there. So ahead of this year’s trip I was put in touch with one of Goa’s top musical diggers, Leaxan Freitas, who was kind enough to share his approach to finding rare Goan music

It’s an absolutely fascinating story of music pre-internet, where you sometimes have to wait for record owners to pass away before anyone can hear a song. Read it on Ransome Note

In an age where music streams instantly at our fingertips, Goan music tells a different story. Much of it exists only on degraded cassettes, dusty records, and brittle shellac discs, jealously guarded by collectors who treat them as sacred artifacts rather than commodities. Through his project, jokingly titled “Moldy Tapes from Goa” Freitas has made it his mission to preserve this disappearing repertoire, navigating protective owners, Goa’s unforgiving climate, and the natural decay of poorly manufactured formats.

Here is my interview with Leaxan recorded at the Loja in Goa, near the festival:

Brian: Hi Leaxan, how are you doing?

Leaxan Freitas: Doing good! It’s a lovely spot here, and I’m looking forward to doing more of what we’ve been sharing at the festival. All my work is on vinyl or tapes, which is quite a challenge to keep up. Goa has recorded music going back to 1928. 1908 was the first recorded song, but 1928 was the first I have been able to track down, starting with recordings on shellac discs and moving on to vinyl and later tapes. These records are really hard to find. For example, All India Radio, or Akashvani, has its own collection. Then there are private collectors like me and a few others. Most of the people I know who collect are around 20 years older than me, and they’ve been doing it since the records were originally available in stores. I started collecting in 2011, just after finishing college. By that time, it was already difficult to find them. And the quality varies; sometimes a disc has a song you want, but it’s full of crackles and skips. Sometimes you get lucky. I’ve got one disc that’s cracked, so two songs are gone, but the rest still plays fine. Or an EP where one side’s scratched but the other is perfect.

Nobody really sells Konkani records. It’s like an unspoken rule. If you have two copies, you can trade, but that’s about it. I’ve done trades here and there over the years—once I even traded three EPs for one LP. It’s not about quantity; it’s about the music and what it means. Having all this music on vinyl is special. When I was studying and living outside Goa, it kept me connected to home. I’d listen to these records, have some urak (Goan’s alcoholic drink made from cashews), and it would transport me back.

Brian: That was going to be my next question—why did you get into it in the first place?

Leaxan Freitas: It was definitely about staying connected to home. When you leave Goa for a city like Bangalore, you can’t get the same people, the beaches, the greenery, the food. Even at Goan restaurants, it’s never quite the same. The only thing you can really take with you is the music. And the music helps you stay in touch with the language too. When you’re not surrounded by people speaking Konkani, the songs keep you connected to the land and the culture. I started with digital versions, then cassettes, and eventually moved on to vinyl, building my collection bit by bit.

Brian: So some of this music is available digitally on Spotify and YouTube, but some isn’t, right?

Leaxan Freitas: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the music released by HMV, now known as Saregama, is online. You’ll find it on Spotify, YouTube Music, and other streaming services. But there’s a huge amount that isn’t available anywhere digitally. Some records I’ve only seen pictures of; I’ve never even heard the music.

Brian: It’s fascinating. You were saying before that these records are like antiques, pieces of art. Collectors don’t sell them; they just hold on to them for life, maybe trading occasionally.

Leaxan Freitas: Yes, absolutely. These collections often sit in homes like prized antiques. When someone passes away, they might just get given away. That’s why I feel it’s important to play this music publicly, at events or on radio, so it doesn’t just sit locked away. It should be heard.

Brian: You played a 100% Goan vinyl set on Friday at Sultry Mist. How did that go?

Leaxan Freitas: It was amazing. This was my third time doing a full Konkani vinyl set. I’d done it before at the Echoes of Earth festival in Goa. The response was fantastic. As far as I know, nobody else has performed an all-Konkani vinyl set live, so it felt special. There’s so much energy in the crowd when they hear something familiar yet rare. It’s been wonderful to see people reconnect with this music.

Brian: As someone of Goan heritage living abroad, I find it fascinating. Trying to understand the culture through music has been difficult from afar. There are a few compilations like the Smithsonian’s Mando recordings and some things on streaming services, but hearing these songs on vinyl, in their original format, is something very special.

Leaxan Freitas: Some of these records go back to the 1970s, and I even have a few older shellac discs. Goa’s weather isn’t kind to analog formats. Mold gets into the grooves, and the paper sleeves become brittle. As soon as I get a record, I clean it and transfer it into a new sleeve. I’ve scanned all the artwork to preserve it, because I can’t travel with the originals. Sometimes collectors reach out asking for scanned covers, and I’m always happy to share. If you have the record, you want the artwork to go with it.

Brian: And there’s also this amazing story about the bootleg cassettes, right?

Leaxan Freitas: Yes. While digging through old tapes, I noticed something strange: the bootleg cassettes often sounded better than the originals. The official ones were made in Bombay using lower-quality materials, while the copies made in the Middle East used TDK or Sony tapes. Many Goans were working in Dubai, Kuwait, or Muscat, and when they came home, one of the first things they brought back was a tape player. They’d record from All India Radio or make copies of their favorite songs. Ironically, those homemade or bootleg versions have lasted longer and often sound better today.

Brian: It’s funny, isn’t it? Back in the 90s people said, “Home taping is killing music,” but in this case, home taping actually preserved it.

Leaxan Freitas: Exactly. Without those tapes, a lot of this music would have disappeared. Sadly, the Goa branch of All India Radio shut down most of its Konkani programming last year. They used to air a few hours of music a day, and people would record songs off the radio. Those tapes are now part of history.

Brian: There’s a sense that Goan culture and language are under threat, especially with so many outsiders settling in. This kind of archiving feels more important than ever.

Leaxan Freitas: Yes, especially with Konkani. Unlike other Indian languages that have one main script, Konkani is written in both Devanagari and Roman scripts. Roman Konkani, which most Goan music is written in, doesn’t have the same official recognition as Devanagari. There’s now a push to give Roman Konkani equal status so that writers, musicians, and lyricists working in it can receive grants and recognition. If anyone questions its importance, they only need to look at the thousands of songs written and recorded in that script.

Brian: It sounds like a huge mission to preserve it all.

Leaxan Freitas: It is. Sometimes people hear about what I’m doing and donate tapes or records that were just lying around at home. That’s how I’ve been able to grow the collection. Records, though, are much harder to find.

Brian: Thanks for your time, Leaxan. We’re heading to the festival now, where you’ll be running a workshop on this topic and playing some of this incredible music.

Leaxan Freitas: Yes, and I’ve been thinking of calling the project Moldy Tapes from Goa (a tongue in cheek nod to ‘Awesome Tapes from Africa). I want to start putting material online, reviewing the tapes, describing the music, and sharing stories from the artists themselves.

Brian: That sounds amazing. For anyone who wants to explore more of this music, where can they find you online?

Leaxan Freitas: I’ve just started a website called cantaram.com.

Follow Leaxan
Art Deco inspired structures in Goa: Goenchideco

Bird of Paradise is out now.

Anyone in London: Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing) is next Sunday 30th Nov.

TICKETS