Helen Anahita Wilson: Women Make Music
New biophilic album, “EAT ME DON’T EAT ME”
Helen Anahita Wilson is an award-winning composer, sound artist, and performer who collaborates with plants, trees, people, and other living beings. As composer-in-residence at Chelsea Physic Garden in London, Wilson’s biophilic, creative relationship with plants has developed far beyond sonification to a new form of collaborative composition with the natural world. Her unique interpretations of plant biodata and physiological activity readings, through the application of experimental Western and South Asian compositional techniques, have lead to a number of groundbreaking, interspecies music-making projects.
PRS Foundation will be supporting Helen Anahita Wilson’s latest album project which digs deep into the earthy, creative possibilities of composing with bioelectricity, biorhythms, and biodata from the Solanaceae family of flowering plants (also known as the Nightshades). Incorporating recordings from the Swedish arctic tomato and the English screaming mandrake, to name but two, EAT ME DON’T EAT ME musically transducts the toxic and edible traits of this diverse plant family in a collection of new works ranging from potato-generated inflorescent technoglitch to actinomorphic melodies derived from the bisexual flowers of the deadly nightshade Atropa Belladonna.