Mutantrumpet inventor and composer Ben Neill joins forces with chaos mathematician and visual artist Ralph Abraham to create an otherworldly blend of live electronic music and interactive video. The project combines Neill’s ambient electronic music performed on his futuristic Mutantrumpet with Abraham’s mathematically generated imagery, which is dynamically activated and processed in real time.

The music is taken from Neill’s two most recent recording projects; Trove is a 104 track album released during the Covid pandemic, and Prana Cantos (2023) is part of the Six Degrees Records Soundbalm series of ambient music and meditation recordings. Abraham’s videos show slowly rotating chaotic attractors in the form of 3D fractoids which are inspired by Abraham’s psychedelic experiences. These 3D rotating videos are the raw source of the primary animations modulated in performance by Neill’s Mutantrumpet, as well as faders manipulated by Abraham. Neill’s reflective, atmospheric music emanates entirely from the notes and timbres of his self-designed instrument – no other sound sources are used. The subtle timbral improvisations of his multi-belled instrument are captured in real time and transformed into richly textured drones and pulses using a Fibonacci series-based processing matrix. The sequences on which the music is based are used to model the forces of growth and reproduction in the natural dynamical systems of plants and animals.

Abraham and Neill met in 2010 and have been developing their work together since that time. Their shared interests in mathematics, vibrations, psychedelics, and cross-media resonances inform their collaboration. Abraham was one of the pioneering figures in the development of chaos theory, which asserts there are patterns and feedback loops underneath the seeming chaos in nature. Neill is widely recognized as a musical innovator through his recordings, performances and installations, which blur the lines between digital media and acoustic instrument performance.