In “Morphic Resonance”, Ben Neill doesn’t just compose a track. He constructs an alternate physics for music itself. The piece, named after biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s controversial theory that memory exists in nature through morphic fields, unfolds like a living system.

It’s cyclical, reactive and quietly radical. It’s not a song you hear once and remember – it’s one that seems to remember you.

At the heart of the track is Neill’s signature instrument, the Mutantrumpet. It is a futuristic brass hybrid that fuses trumpet valves with MIDI controllers and an interface for looping and manipulating live sound in real time.

But in “Morphic Resonance”, the Mutantrumpet does more than perform. It self-generates, becoming both source and sample, pattern and pulse. Every electronic texture on the track originates from the instrument’s acoustic timbre, warped and folded back on itself like a sonic Möbius strip. What emerges is not ambient in the traditional sense. There are moments of meditative drift, yes, but also a faint unease. A dissonant edge that recalls the fractal unpredictability of natural systems.

Neill has often spoken of creating music as a form of ecology, and here he leans fully into that metaphor. Layers accumulate, loop, disintegrate and reassemble, suggesting the memory like layering of sediment or neural pathways. Each listen reveals something previously submerged.

A heavily processed recording of Sheldrake’s voice haunts the margins of the piece, offering an eerie but grounding presence. In the “Spectral Mix” version, a glitchy beat skitters beneath the surface, generated by machine learning software that improvises around Neill’s cues. Even the track’s melodic architecture is shaped by language. Neill uses text-to-melody software to translate the title’s letters into a 16-note theme that becomes the composition’s cellular backbone.

What could have been overly cerebral in lesser hands becomes transcendent in Neill’s. This is experimental music with deep heart, haunted by memory, curiosity and a belief in sound’s capacity to alter consciousness. If Sheldrake’s theory suggests that nature remembers, then Neill’s work proposes music as its dream state.

Ben Neill: Sonic Architect of the Post-Human Trumpet

Ben Neill is a composer, performer, and inventor best known for creating the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electroacoustic instrument that merges traditional brass with custom-built digital interfaces. Trained as a classical trumpeter, Neill studied with minimalist pioneer La Monte Young and has spent decades navigating the intersections of sound art, algorithmic composition and multimedia performance.

Described by Wired as “a creative composer, genius performer, and inventor of a new genre,” Neill’s career spans avant-garde experimentation, electronic club music, and academic research. His work has been presented at institutions like MoMA, the Whitney Museum and the Venice Biennale, and he has collaborated with artists as diverse as David Wojnarowicz, DJ Spooky and Pauline Oliveros.

Neill is also a writer and theorist, and his recent book Diffusing Music explores the democratization of sound and the evolving role of musicians in an era of digital abundance and artificial intelligence. His ongoing project Amalgam Sphere reflects these concerns, merging ambient, downtempo, and drum and bass with conceptual underpinnings rooted in networked creativity.

With Morphic Resonance, Neill returns to a deeply personal thread in his artistic life – his engagement with speculative science and expanded states of consciousness. Having collaborated in the past with thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, Neill continues to explore how sound can act not only as expression, but as inquiry. A living system that asks its own questions.

Find out more about Ben Neill on his Website