Music inspired by healing plants: a playlist by

Plants Heal

Music

Audio-visual trio Plants Heal outline some enlightening music inspired by healing plants, following the release of their highly recommended latest album; an intoxicating listen of compulsive, hallucinatory jazz, ambient, dub and techno.

Plants Heal are an audio-visual trio who make psychedelic electronic music, made up of Dan Nicholls (synths), Dave De Rose (drums) & Lou Zon aka Louise Boer (visuals).

Nicholls has released solo work on influential Finnish label We Jazz, and has played as a keyboardist with the likes of Squarepusher, Goldie, and Matthew Herbert. De Rose has toured with John Grant and worked with Mulatu Astatke, and has been prolific across myriad solo and collaborative projects, including Agile Experiments, a project and release series chronicling improvisatory performances which began with regular concerts outside a pizzeria in Brixton Village, South London (Che buono!). Conversely, Lou Zon’s creative world is situated in documentary and experimental filmmaking as well as visual anthropology. Together, these distinct aesthetic strands converge in compelling ways with Plants Heal and the project’s label debut ‘Forest Dwellers’, released on Italian imprint Quindi Records.

Nicholls and De Rose have been running the Free Movements night in London since 2018, which explores the interplay between instrumental music, live electronics, and DJ sets. Described as the – ahem – seeds of the project, the trio released a self-titled debut before performing extensive live dates at clubs and festivals. This momentum led to two days of recording sessions in Athens and eventually, their recently released second album ‘Forest Dwellers’.

It’s an album that deftly synthesizes these filaments of activity, musicality and visual conception, with music that feels loose and intuitive, yet rhythmically exacting and metronomic. Compulsive and hypnotic, it’s an ideal fusion of live and direct musicianship, and hallucinatory electronics, at times evoking lysergic, krautrock-inflected acid techno (‘Avena Moon’), dilatory soundsystem music (‘Low Nova’) – like a live, post-rave reconstruction of Ability II’s ‘Pressure’ – and perhaps, Holy Tongue playing a marathon set in the enveloping Königsforst of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project (‘Alien Hardware’). Like stepping into an improv gig, a rave, and a soundsystem clash all at once, it’s an intoxicating listen.

The visuals created by Lou Zon only add to the special mystique of the project, with analogue footage run through various effects and focused on medicinal plants such as yarrow, hawthorn, nettle and thistle. All of these plants feature on the record’s artwork, and Lou’s recent video for ‘Space Ballad‘ comprised footage filmed in the desert in Wadi Rum, Jordan. It’s a beautiful watch.

To recognize the release of the record, and to find out more about the foundations of the project, we tapped up the members of Plants Heal to put together a themed playlist. They responded with an eclectic rundown of music inspired by the healing power of plants. Check out the ‘Space Ballad‘ video, then read and listen through below.

‘Forest Dwellers’ is out now via Quindi Records and available on Bandcamp, but is categorically not available on Spotify (fair play!).

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LISTEN

Aka Girls, Forest Peoples Music – A Sweet Lullaby

Dan: The singing on this recording is so beautiful, it blows me away. Aka are a nomadic people whose oral tradition includes complex polyrhythmic singing and ‘hocketing’ (where voices interlock in counterpoint, giving the impression of a resulting melody/rhythm). The way in which oral traditions can carry cultural meaning is something that I find so inspiring, and this is an instance where indigenous knowledge is carried person-to-person through sound.

Aka Girls, Forest Peoples Music – A Sweet Lullaby

Dan: The singing on this recording is so beautiful, it blows me away. Aka are a nomadic people whose oral tradition includes complex polyrhythmic singing and ‘hocketing’ (where voices interlock in counterpoint, giving the impression of a resulting melody/rhythm). The way in which oral traditions can carry cultural meaning is something that I find so inspiring, and this is an instance where indigenous knowledge is carried person-to-person through sound.
Meredith Monk - Eon (On behalf of Nature)

Lou: This is a beautiful, gentle, and hypnotic track from Meredith Monk’s album On Behalf of Nature. Listening to her music always moves me deeply and fills me with inspiration. Released in 2013, the album explores our intimate connection with the natural world as well as the destructive forces of climate change. I love how Meredith Monk uses abstract sound and movement to express her relationship with the more-than-human world and to increase the listener’s awareness of nature.
Pharoah Sanders – Harvest Time

Dan: Thinking of food as a healing force is something that is often in the background in UK culture. Since I started to do qigong (an ancient Chinese movement practice) my body seemed to start telling me what to eat! I’d be making potions out of ginger, garlic, chillies, veg, salts, turmeric, sage…all in a kind of intuitive way. I don’t know if Pharoah Sanders was thinking about food in this way when he recorded Harvest Time but it feels like a golden celebration of food and its importance in our lives.
Commodity Place – Soils

Davide: This track gets me shivering. It’s like everything that we know is in process: the demise of our “old” natural world poignantly calls out for help through this music. With the album ‘Requiem for a Living Planet’, Commodity Place borrows and reinterprets a concept from an old book of Charles Darwin, where he theorized the existence of a brain in plant roots.
William Parker - Anast In Crisis Mouth Full Of Fresh Cut Flowers

Dan: William Parker’s survival techniques ‘demand liberty and solos for all . . . expressing music in colors and feelings’ – this kind of says it all. I remember being at a William Parker masterclass when I was at music college. Here were all these folks within the walls of the college, being fed the script for how to play music, and William just came with his warmth and love and got everyone to improvise. He’s such a channeller of musical freedom and collectivity!
3aneed Ana - عنيد أنا, - Al Fajer Group

Lou: I really love Al Fajer (The Dawn), the 1988 album by the Palestinian group Al Fajer, recently reissued by the Palestinian Sound Archive (Majazz Project). I chose it for the way it merges political memory with the natural world. In 3aneed Ana – عنيد أنا, the band sings about the soil, wind, wheat and meadows as symbols of resistance, resilience and rootedness.
Green-House – Peperomia Seedling

Davide: This kind of mesmerising, immersive track literally feels like it’s healing all my senses from beginning to end. The space, warmth and lack of unnecessary frills brings depth to my whole body. Peperomia is an antioxidant, analgesic, and anti-tumor agent and when used topically the plant helps boost healing and improves skin irritation.
Lawrence Le Doux – Cayenne

Lou: I discovered the music of Lawrence Le Doux while watching Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), directed by Fabrizio Terranova. The soundtrack of this film always stuck with me, and I am particularly drawn to the first track of the album Music for Documentaries, which captures a sense of space, atmosphere, and subtle natural rhythm that feels both intimate and expansive. Listening to dreamy sounds like these always brings me closer to the natural world and inspires me to make visual art that expresses my love for plants.
Paul Schütze - The Lotus Voltage

Dave: Almost as if to walk you hand in hand with the spiritual and healing abilities of the Lotus flower, this track penetrates and disables my senses, bringing me in closer to the audio field, only to realise there are sources of joy and beauty very close to me already. I’m constantly surprised by its depth and perspective.
Silvia Bolognesi / Dudú Kouate / Griffin Rodriguez – Timing Birds (Astral Spirits)

Dan: Dudù Kouate is a dear friend who we recently invited to our event series Free Movements. Dudù’s presence is a healing force in itself, everything he touches turns to music and we spend a lot of time talking about healing plants in Senegalese culture. Our events have a big plant theme, with installations around healing herbs, Mugwort being one of our favourites. You’ll always find big bunches hanging throughout the space.