Our mission is simple: To Connect Electronic and Natural Worlds
Mushrooms are ancient technologies, New release: Outernaltional Dance featuring Esperanto, a universal language, Auntie Flo live show, Plants Can Dance
I’m on a mission to connect the electronic world to the natural one. This framing came to me during the build up to the Auntie Flo live show at the end of March, and seemed to resonate with a few of you.
During the event, we debuted a new bird-themed audio-visual Auntie Flo show performing some of the highlights from ‘In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free)’. The support slot debuted my new concept ‘Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing)’ - my exploration into bioelectrical music using plants and mushrooms (and other living organisms) as a live composer, facilitating the creation of acoustic ecologies via modular synth and other electronic effects.
It dawned on me that connecting these worlds is a perfect way of summing up what I’ve been trying to do with A State Of Flo and my creative output over the past few years. I’ve now spent five years bringing nature via fungi, plants and animals into the four walls of the nightclub, onto festival stages, gallery spaces and schools. During these performances and installations, I’ve had a chance to listen deeply to the natural world and have come to think of it as this incredible piece of technology, fundamental to the world we live in. Being able to give it a voice via electronic music techniques has proven to be a creatively inspiring path: a marriage of ancient and modern, natural and synthetic - a symbiosis of two worlds that have largely been separated by the modern world we inhabit.
I’m pleased to report that both performances were successfully delivered to a packed Omeara in London, and the feedback has been tremendous - so thank you if you made it down.
A Vision of Utopia
The electronic music world has been the world that I have existed in for the past twenty years. My head was turned to it when I first experienced techno music at the T In The Park festival back in 1997 where I heard (and felt) Jeff Mills playing his renowned brand of Detroit techno. To my teenage years, it sounded like the future: this vast wall of noise. Completely alien to my virgin ears but strangely appealing, I was fully hooked from that point. It was discombobulating in a drone continuum sense, a sonic womb, generating a full body and mind experience.
This started me on a path through electronic music and so-called ‘underground’ club culture and this world felt like utopia for a long time, the ‘futurism’ element a path toward a better, less fractured world. In more recent times, through a combination of getting older and being witness to the creeping commercialisation (and insta-gramification) of the scene, this utopian vision unfortunately now only appears truly transformational in fleeting moments.
Perhaps this is why I felt a calling to nature. I’d lived in cities all my life with London being my home for the past 15 years. I’m totally habituated to city noise - sirens, planes, traffic, people. Lucikly in London, this is balanced somewhat by being our many green spaces, birthing birds and other natural sounds. During the lockdown, I started tuning into the city soundscape using more effective microphones before turning to biosonification as a means of extrapolating natures voice through the world of bioelectricity.
My work now combines all these disciplines, using field recordings, bioelectrical data and electronic production methods via modular synthesisers, vintage drums machines, classic synths, and acoustic instruments that I’ve accumulated on my travels.
Everything is electric
We often forget that to be alive is the create electricity. Whether this electricity tells us anything other than the binary ‘living’ or ‘dead’ analysis, I’ll leave to another post (as I get asked about its relationship with plant intelligence a lot) but as a creative, the means of connecting bio-electricity with electronic instruments has proved to be extremely fertile ground.
Everything we do at A State Of Flo can be viewed through this lens and I’m pleased to report that we have many releases lined up and a bunch of live gigs planned. We’ll do an announcement of a series of Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing) events soon, so stay tuned.
New Release: Outernational Dance
I’ve got a new EP out for pre-order today (Bandcamp day). It called Outernational Dance and is out on my good friends label Multi Culti, a label who I’ve worked with for many years.
Continuing in the vein of my recent productions, Outernational Dance creates a sound ecology with one foot in the natural world and one foot in the electronic one. It uses bird chirps and field recordings in a more metaphorical way than ‘In My Dreams’, but the result are hopefully the same - a transportive trip to a fictional place, a borderless utopia where one can be free.
Outernational Dance is inspired by ‘Esperanto’, a form of universal language created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. It was intended to be a universal second language for international communication. All track titles were taken from Zamenhof’s writing.