Some pieces of music feel like they’re trying to impress you from the second they start. “Nature Loves Courage” isn’t one of them. Instead, composer Ben Neill’s newest single drifts in softly, almost shyly, as if it’s been in the room for a while and you’re only just beginning to notice.
It’s gentle, patient, and grounding and has a way of subtly changing the energy around you without demanding anything.
This piece is part of Neill’s upcoming album, Amalgam Sphere, but it also carries a much more personal thread. The title comes from something Terence McKenna once wrote in Neill’s copy of The Archaic Revival, a phrase that clearly stayed with Neill long after McKenna’s passing.
You can feel that history in the music. There’s a sense of someone circling back to an old conversation and picking it up again.
Neill builds the entire track from the live sampled sounds of his Mutantrumpet—a wild, hybrid instrument he invented that blends brass and electronics.
There are no synths hiding underneath and no digital pads filling in space. Everything you hear comes from the Mutantrumpet being reshaped in real time, treated almost like raw clay being pulled into new forms.
Even the melody has a story. Neill uses software that turns letters into pitches, so the phrase “nature loves courage” literally becomes the musical material. From there he layers in fractal patterns and a rhythm based on the Fibonacci sequence—ideas that could feel overly academic if the final result weren’t so natural and inviting. Despite all of this structure, “Nature Loves Courage” sounds more like a small ecosystem than a technical experiment.
The listening experience is simple: it restores you. The music swells and recedes like light shifting across a wall, or like the way air feels different right before it rains. You can put it on during a morning routine, a slow walk, or an evening reset, and it subtly changes the atmosphere, adding a quiet sense of intention.
For an audience who value how music shapes the mood of a room or the feeling of a moment, “Nature Loves Courage” is kind of ideal. It has just enough emotional presence to stick with you, but it also asks you to listen inwards a little bit.
What makes it unique is the tenderness. There is something very moving about a musician returning to a phrase gifted to him decades ago from a friend who has helped to shape his worldview.
“Nature Loves Courage” is very much like a thank you letter, or maybe a final collaboration that took its time finding the right form.
About Ben Neill
Ben Neill isn’t just a composer or a performer. He is one of those rare artists who seems to live right at the edge of where music, technology and visual art blur into each other.
Neill is the mind behind the Mutantrumpet, an electro acoustic hybrid that looks a bit like something from the future and sounds like nothing else on the planet. Wired Magazine once said he “uses a schizophrenic trumpet to create art music for the people,” which honestly might be the most accurate description of both the instrument and the man playing it.
Neill’s work is all about expanding what music can be. By pairing the Mutantrumpet with interactive computer systems, he creates pieces that feel totally alive – sound and visuals reacting in real time, folding into one another in ways that make the line between acoustic and electronic feel irrelevant. His music often lives in that sweet spot where minimalism meets something more atmospheric and with a touch of digital magic.
Across his career, he has released thirteen albums on labels like Universal/Verve, Astralwerks, Thirsty Ear, Six Degrees and now his own Blue Math imprint through AWAL/Sony. Each project explores a slightly different corner of his world, but they all share a sense of curiosity and a hunger for new shapes, new textures and new ways of listening.
Neill is not just making music he’s thinking deeply about it too. In 2024 he published his first book, Diffusing Music, through Bloomsbury Press, offering a glimpse into the ideas that have driven his work for decades.
Ben Neill is one of those artists who never stops experimenting, never stops building, never stops imagining what might come next. And that curiosity is exactly what makes his music feel so alive.
Find out more about Ben Neill on his website.