Button pushers: the artists making music from mushrooms

Musicians and scientists armed with synths and electrodes are plugging in to mushrooms and cacti to encourage humans to reconnect with the Earth

To musician Tarun Nayar, mushrooms sound squiggly and wonky. Nayar's organismic music" project Modern Biology has only been active since last summer but, with his videos of mushrooms making calming ambient soundscapes, he's already racked up more than half a million TikTok followers and 25m views.

The electronic artist and former biologist hangs out in mushroom circles, spending summers in the northern Gulf Islands of British Columbia with the Sheldrake brothers: Merlin, the author of the bestselling Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, and producer-songwriter Cosmo. So it seems only natural that he would begin foraging mushrooms - not to eat, but to listen to.