Name: Wild Anima
Nationality: French
Occupation: Sound Artist
Current Release: Wild Anima's new album Phytosynthesis is out via USM. Buy a physical copy on bandcamp. Stream here.

If you enjoyed this interview with Wild Anima and would like to find out more about her work and music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

To dive deeper, we recommend our expansive 15 Questions Wild Anima interview, as well as our conversation with her about “Mantras, Healing and the Heart as an Oscillator.”

On the topic of her new album Photosynthesis, we conducted earlier interviews with her on the beauty of rain and the sound of a society and Interspecies Communication.



What sparked your interest to listening to plants and even basing an album around it?

I knew about plant music from Data Garden, one of the projects behind plantwave - the device that I am using currently to play music from plants.

My friend Michael Reiley McDermott, an amazing sound artist, had briefly introduced me to Joe Patitucci who is running Data Garden. I was very intrigued for a few years while growing my own inner connection to the plant world through my artistic practice until I was creating Supernatural, an album that has now grown into a multidisciplinary experience. This clearly marked the shift for me to welcome plants as the central concept of this project and as part of my music creation.

Through instagram I saw pop up a live show of Masterplants Orchestra on someone’s stories, I can’t explain why but I instantly wanted to know what this band was. I found there website and connected deeply with their vision and ethos of creating devices that can play plantmusic. I immediately wrote to them, explaining that I would love to collaborate with them on Supernatural.



I met Tritone Crisantemo, the main leader of the project and it naturally arose that I should myself play plantmusic. It was like a dream come true, a dream I didn’t even imagine. Sometimes things turn out even better than what you envisioned. I could now play music with nature directly.

The feeling is beyond words. Playing with plants amazes me every time. The experience is really quite unique. Because it is never the exact same thing, the lively nature of the plants makes it really unpredictable and triggers a sense of awe and astonishment. The way the musical patterns are played is so unique.

As I developed this practice I started to understand that this was an entirely new genre of music arising. The term phyto-synthesis started to arise. Sound synthesis made with plants, phyto in Greek is the term for plant. I later thought of this as an extension of Supernatural, a performative sound art piece with plants that developed into an ambient album that I created in the frame of USM the Greek label that I’ve released this with. I loved their sound aesthetic and wanted to match that with this concept.

Many of the pieces contain vocals, but each has its own structure, suggesting an almost improvisational process. How did the music take shape?

I first started this album with a performance piece I had called “Phytosynthesis” which I presented at an exhibition opening in November 2022 for the visual artist Hadass Gilboa.

While preparing for the performance I was experimenting playing my houseplants into my moogmother32. I first came up with a few soundscapes that felt very interesting. These are on the album as the 3 Phytosynthesis short soundscapes. I wanted to keep those raw without too much post editing, and include them in their original form in the album. A bit like audio photographs as imprints to the whole album tracklist.

A few months later the idea of the album came up when talking with Kostas aka AgainstMe who manages USM with Mic Meimaroglou. That inspired me to start editing those shorter tracks into new soundscapes and record new parts with the plants. As the label is from Greece, I wanted to dive into the ancient Greek music sound as an inspiration. I have also been playing the lyre for over a year now and it made sense to start introducing that instrument with the plants as well.

I’ve been very inspired by the asklepion healing sanctuaries of ancient Greece and like to put the music from plants in that context. It makes a lot of sense to me.

How did the beats on some of the pieces come about? Are they also a processed form of the plant output - or something added later on?

The beats have been added later on yes, I wanted to follow the minimal experimental techno aesthetic of the label and create soundscapes that would merge the plants’ sound with heartbeat type sounds.

You're using the PlantWave for extracting sound from plants. Can you just briefly describe why the device seemed ideal to you and what its benefits and limits are? Were there alternatives?

I really like the sound design that the PlantWave has on its app and that I am also able to directly connect it to my synthesizers or computer through MIDI. It has a lovely light show as well that I find really soothing when I’m listening to the plants. The coloured lights evolve as the sound develops.

I had discovered the previous device Data Garden had created called the Midi Sprout and I felt like I wanted to buy my first plant device from them. It is a very portable small device and is very easy to use. It is a bit limited in a live performance sense because I can only use one plant at a time through the MIDI connection.

I actually really started making plantmusic myself thanks to the amazing group called Masterplants, that I’ve mentioned above. They create plantmusic devices, they have a prototype that can play up to 8 plants simultaneously like a proper orchestra. This project has emerged out of the initial “Music of the Plants”, the original creators of plant music devices dating from the 70’s. Their latest device is called the Bamboo and seems very fun to use.

My partner just got the more geeky version of plantmusic devices called the Symbiotic by Spad Electronics, it is very fun as well, it is Is sold in a way that you assemble the electronic parts by yourself. And very affordable under 100 euros.