If you’ve ever scrolled past a video of a mushroom seemingly composing its own ambient soundtrack and thought, “Wait, what am I looking at?” — congratulations, you’ve met Modern Biology. And this fall, the project behind those 200 million-plus views is trading the phone screen for the pews.

Tarun Nayar, the Vancouver-based biologist-turned-synth artist behind Modern Biology, has announced the Mushroom Church Fall 2026 North American tour: an eight-city run of immersive performances staged inside historic churches, opening October 13 in Chicago and wrapping October 25 in Los Angeles. Tickets go on sale Wednesday, June 17 at tickets.modernbiology.xyz.

Here’s the premise, in case you’re new to the fungal fandom: Nayar plugs living plants and mushrooms into a modular synthesizer, measures the tiny fluctuations in their bioelectricity, and translates those signals into pitch and rhythm in real time. Trained from childhood in Indian classical music and holding a master’s degree in biology, he shapes each improvisation to the time of day and season, following the logic of Indian raga. The result sits somewhere between a science lecture, a meditation retreat, and a very polite rave for root systems.

At a sold-out 2025 stop, CBC Arts documented audiences lying on church floors, imagining themselves as mycelial networks, then erupting in cheers of “mushrooms!” from the balcony as if calling a rock star back for an encore. Each Mushroom Church evening pairs a short scientific talk and a poetry reading with a live plant-and-mushroom performance and mesmerizing projection mapping — an invitation, as Nayar puts it, to “try on” plant and fungal consciousness.

Watch Modern Biology’s Mushroom Church (Live in Vancouver): https://www.youtube.com/@ModernBiology

Nayar’s résumé reads like a choose-your-own-adventure book. He grew up in Montreal, toured as a member of Delhi 2 Dublin, and pivoted mid-pandemic into biosonification. In August 2025, in partnership with Scottish synth designers Instruō, Modern Biology released the Pocket Scion — an affordable device that turns plants, fungi, and human touch into sound. It promptly became the #1 best-selling synthesizer at Thomann, Europe’s largest music retailer, for three consecutive months.

The project opened the Nobel Prize Museum’s fungi exhibition in Stockholm in 2023, and has performed at MOCA in Los Angeles and Art Basel in Miami. The Guardian called the work “vital in forming deeper connections with the natural world,” with additional coverage from the BBC, Vice, The Verge, DJ Mag, CBC, Nerdist, and Atlas Obscura. The tour also coincides with the release of the live album Mushroom Church Vol. 1.

True to form, Nayar is putting his money where his mycelium is: the lion’s share of the project’s proceeds go toward protecting wild places, and the tour is being hosted in partnership with the Fungi Foundation, an organization dedicated to documenting the world’s fungi and protecting their habitats.

“Right now, I think the most important thing artists can do is bring people together,” Nayar says. “Art, and music, can bring us out of our minds — our thoughts, opinions, and politics — and into our emotions, our bodies, into a feeling of connection with each other and the natural world.”

Mushroom Church Fall 2026 Tour Dates:

Oct 13 – Chicago, IL
Oct 15 – Philadelphia, PA
Oct 16 – New York, NY
Oct 17 – Washington, DC
Oct 18 – Toronto, ON
Oct 22 – Seattle, WA
Oct 23 – Portland, OR
Oct 25 – Los Angeles, CA

Tickets are on sale Wednesday, June 17 at tickets.modernbiology.xyz. Whether you’re a synth nerd, a mycology obsessive, or just someone who could use an hour of lying on a church floor pretending to be a fern, this one’s worth the pilgrimage.