You press play. The first thing you hear is not quite words but the opening of a question—a voice lifting, delicate, over ambient sound. "Are you listening?" The video shows what appears to be filaments of mycelium, white threads against dark earth, branching endlessly. "Can you feel us?" asks Beautiful Chorus on Brilliant Mycelium, a three-minute song from the 2020 Fantastic Fungi Reimagine soundtrack. The lyrics are few, simple, and they return again and again, as if seeking an answer. "Share our wisdom. We're sentient and nourishing. We're elegant and flourishing."
This is not a song designed to entertain you. It is a song designed to change what you listen for.
Written by Alexandra Love with footage from Dr. Patrick Hickey, Brilliant Mycelium works through a kind of contemplative insistence. The voice repeats the same set of questions and declarations, building them into a practice rather than a narrative. "Have you visioned? Are you listening? Can you feel us?" Each repetition is an invitation to check in: Right now, in this moment, am I present? The song models the very listening it asks for—sustained, open, turned toward a voice most of us have been trained to ignore.
The lyrical content is remarkable in its directness. The song does not propose that mycelium is like sentient consciousness. It addresses mycelium as sentient: "We're sentient and nourishing. We're elegant and flourishing." This is not poetic metaphor applied to geology or biology. This is a choice to speak to, and on behalf of, a form of life we ordinarily treat as background.
To hear what the song is actually saying, you need some sense of what mycelium is and what it does. Mycelium is the root-like body of a fungus—a vast underground network of filaments that decomposes organic matter, cycles nutrients through soil, and connects plants and trees in communication networks sometimes called "nature's internet." This isn't fringe speculation; it's established biology. The mycelial network processes and redistributes life's essential elements. Nothing in a forest floor community happens without it.
What remains open—what the song seems to be addressing—is the question of whether this process constitutes a form of intelligence or consciousness. The song doesn't argue the question scientifically. Instead, it practices a different way of relating: not debating whether mycelium is conscious, but asking what happens if you treat it as conscious. If you listen. If you pay attention. If you extend to it the same openness you might offer another person.
This is the work of contemplative art.
About two-thirds of the way through, the song names something unexpected: "fear." Until this moment, Brilliant Mycelium has moved through its questions and declarations with a kind of gentle insistence. But the introduction of fear marks a shift. Fear of what? Of the unfamiliar. Of acknowledging intelligence beyond the human. Of a world that is far more alive and complex than industrial culture has taught us to notice.
The song doesn't linger in the fear. It moves toward "hear us"—a turning point where the listener is no longer only asked to listen, but invited into reciprocal relationship. Can you hear us? The shift from passive reception to mutual engagement is crucial. The song is not asking you to believe something. It is asking you to practice a different way of being in relationship.
Beautiful Chorus positions this work in the lineage of sacred music—music designed not to inform but to transform. The repetition, the simple melodic line, the use of voice as instrument of presence rather than expression of ego—these are techniques found across contemplative traditions. A voice singing the same questions over and over is not trying to convince you of something new. It is trying to create the conditions for you to feel something differently.
The 3:49 duration matters. This is not a three-minute pop song. It's closer to a chant or a meditation, where time works differently. You fall into rhythm with it. Your breath begins to sync with the vocal line. The mycelium on screen becomes less a video and more a mandala—something to gaze into, to find yourself reflected in. This is how contemplative music operates: through steady, patient repetition that invites your nervous system to settle into a different frequency.
Part of what makes Brilliant Mycelium significant is its participation in a larger cultural moment: a rewilding of human perception. Industrial modernity trained us to see the living world as inert—as resources, problems, or background. Recent decades have seen a counter-movement: artists, scientists, and practitioners working to recover our ability to sense life where modernity taught us there was none.
The Fantastic Fungi Reimagine soundtrack, of which this song is a part, sits at this intersection. It takes emerging scientific understanding of mycelial networks and approaches it not through argument but through beauty, through music, through direct sensory and emotional address. For a listener, this means: you don't have to decide whether fungi are conscious in the way your philosophy textbook defines consciousness. You just have to try, for three minutes and forty-nine seconds, to listen as if they might be. And listen to what happens inside you when you do.
If Brilliant Mycelium opens a door, several paths lead outward:
- Toward the science and culture: The Fantastic Fungi ecosystem offers entry into the work of researchers exploring what mycelium does and how expanding our relationship with fungi might inform human health, agriculture, and ecological restoration.
- Toward listening practice: You can return to the song again and again as a meditation, each time perhaps going deeper into the questions it poses. What does it feel like to try to hear from a non-human perspective? What shifts in your body, your awareness, when you practice that kind of listening?
- Toward rewilded attention: The song invites you to notice mycelium in the actual world—in compost, in forest soil, in the fungi in food. To recognize it not as abstraction but as living presence you're already in relationship with.
- Toward community: Beautiful Chorus is part of a broader ecosystem of artists and practitioners working at the edge of consciousness and ecological awakening. Following their work deepens the conversation.
The ultimate gift of Brilliant Mycelium is simple: it gives you permission, and an invitation, to listen differently. Not to the world as you've been trained to hear it, but to the world as it might actually be—infinitely more alive, infinitely more communicative, infinitely more worthy of attention. All you have to do is lean in and listen.
