Ben Neill’s “Morphic Resonance” is not just a piece of music, but is a philosophical gesture rendered in sound.
Released as a dual version single and marking the final chapter of his forthcoming album “Amalgam Sphere”, the work is deeply informed by the theories of Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist whose controversial concept of morphic resonance proposes that memory and learning are not confined to the brain but embedded in nature itself.
That Neill chooses to explore this idea not in a lecture hall, but in a dense, immersive soundscape says a great deal about his own creative philosophy. And, the growing porousness between art, science and technology.
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Neill, who is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Mutantrumpet, a fantastic shape-shifting hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, has built a decades-long career on this kind of boundary-blurring.
Across thirteen albums released on labels like Astralwerks, Six Degrees and Universal’s Verve imprint, Neill’s work has embraced minimalism, ambient electronica, interactive art and jazz, often in the same breath. But Morphic Resonance feels like something new. It is more of a culmination, a synthesis and a provocation.
Central to the track’s construction is Sheldrake’s voice, which Neill doesn’t just sample but transforms into a kind of metaphysical presence. It is at once narrator, texture and spirit guide. Fragments of Sheldrake’s speech drift in and out of the mix, sometimes intelligible, often distorted beyond recognition, suggesting that memory is not a fixed archive but is a vaporous, shape shifting force. The haunt the piece like neural echoes or half remembered dreams.
The sound world that Neill creates around this voice is astonishing in its detail. The original version of the track opens with a delictae interplay of processed trumpet tones and low, glowing drones. Gradually, the sound field thickens, enriched with granulr textures, harmonic overtones, and subtle rhythmic pulses. Rather than moving in a linear arc, the track seems to unfold in spirals and circles back in on itself, expanding and contracting like a breathing organism.
This is music that does not simply develop, but it evolves.
Much of this fluidity comes from the way Neill engages with the Mutantrumpet. With its multiple bells, integrated electronics and gestural control system, it allows for real-time sampling and transformation. The instrument itself is sensitive, reactive and alive. Neill’s use of it here is not virtuosic in the traditional sense; instead, he plays with restraint, allowing the textures and resonances to accumulate organically. The trumpet doesn’t lead so much as it listens.
In a particularly elegant twist, Neill maps the letters in the title “Morphic Resonance” to musical pitches, creating the harmonic and melodic material from linguistic structure itself.
It’s a subtle but profound move, echoing Sheldrake’s ideas about the resonance of forms and habits. Language becomes sound. Sound becomes structure. Structure becomes memory. It’s a recursive loop, and Neill navigates it with remarkable sensitivity.
The “Bifurcated Mix” is the second version included in the release, fracturing this dreamlike world with glitchy percussive interventions and sharper electronic edges. If the original mix is memory as mist or sediment, the Bifurcated version is memory under pressure. The introduction of rhythm here turns it into a shifting terrain of broken patterns and flickering signals. It’s less meditative, and more hallucinatory.
This dual presentation is not just a clever production choice—it reflects the underlying philosophy of the piece. For Sheldrake, morphic resonance is about pattern transmission through time: the idea that habits of nature are inherited non-genetically, through fields of information. Neill’s music channels this idea not by describing it, but by embodying it. Patterns are set and then mutated, phrases recur in altered forms, motifs dissolve and are reborn.
“Morphic Resonance” also acts as a sound companion to Neill’s recent book “Diffusing Music: Trajectories of Sonic Democratization”, in which he considers how emerging technologies from AI to algorithmic composition tools, are changing not just how music is participatory, fluid and radically open ended. Neill’s interest lies not in fixed compositions but in adaptive systems where the boundaries between composer, performer and listener begin to blur.
In this light “Morphic Resonance” asks: what if music isn’t just a product of human creativity, but part of a larger ecological and temporal process? What if memory isn’t stored, but acted out? And what if every performance, every iteration is a ghost of what came before, re-shaped by what is happening now?
One gets the feeling that Amalgam Sphere, when fully released, will only deepen these themes. If Morphic Resonance is the seed, the coming work may very well be the bloom – alive, unpredictable and carrying within it the memory of every note that came before.
Find out more about Ben Neill on his Website
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