Vancouver’s Modern Biology Releases Track Built from Mushrooms

Modern Biology is the new project of veteran musician Tarun Nayar. Formally trained in Indian Classical music and educated as a biologist, Modern Biology sees him turn a new leaf by bringing his passions together in an ambient project that is organismic, uplifting, and deeply contextual. Nayar uses modular synthesis, home built synthesizers and other analog equipment to improvise with the natural vibrations of a certain place and time – via plant bioelectricity, latent electromagnetic radiation, and even the earth’s resonant hum.

New single, “Mushroom Dance,” was recorded with a red-belted conk – a shelf fungus that was growing on an old fir tree in the forest near Nayar’s house. Bringing his modular synthesizer setup into the woods for an early spring session, he used the bioelectricity of the mushroom to inform the main synth lead line by using small changes in conductivity to trigger note changes in the synth. Nayar then went back to the studio and used other odds and ends (and some field recordings) to make a song out of this mushroom recording.