The Mycology TikToker, Embracing Shrooms’ Sound

There’s pure silence in the air until Noah Kalos stretches his hand into the video’s frameAnd clamps a piece of white wire onto an oyster mushroom cluster the size of a bowling ball. Pink and fleshy with pronounced gills, they look like they were plucked from a desert garden on Mars — and they sound even more otherworldly. It is a deep cacophony with bleeps, bloops and other sounds that ensues. I can only imagine what one hears when playing Mario Kart on Ketamine.

Kalos is a tall, bearded, bespectacled male from rural North Carolina. He’s down to earth and used to the quiet life, but he’s also a #mushtok influencer with more than 600,000 followers and eight and a half million likes on TikTok, where his name is MycoLyco. The mushroom-obsessed electronic musician is filmed by fans who show up to see what happens when synthesizers are connected to fungus. A mushroom’s skin, like that of a human, has electrical properties. Unlike ready-to-play synths with keyboards, Kalos’ many-wired modular synths aren’t preset to make a certain sound when you hit a certain button. Instead, they don’t make any sound at all until they are hooked up to something that creates energy. The bioelectrical voltage produced by the cellular activity of mushrooms is transmitted through the wires to create these strange sounds. Think about it: Two instruments can produce voltage by playing exactly the same note, but they may sound very different. As explained by Explain This Stuff, all depends on how the instrument — or mushroom, in this case — “vibrates and makes the air around or inside it vibrate in sympathy.”)

Sometimes he’ll even put two specimens together, and it sounds as if the two toadstools are talking to each other. “It’s a creative collaboration between humans, mushrooms, and machines,”He says it. Rolling Stone from a room he frequents often — the spare bedroom he renovated to become part recording studio, part mycology lab.

Kalos’s first video YouTubeThe video went viral with over a million hits. “I made like $5,000 in two weeks from it,” he says, adding that TikTok doesn’t generate nearly as much revenue even though he’s now more popular there, though he declines to cite any numbers. “If you say how much you make from it, they can kick you out of the Creator Fund.” (Kalos doesn’t think that’s fair — but he doesn’t “want to be the one to have to sue TikTok,”He said. “I don’t have lawyer money.”)

Since going viral, Kalos has popped up on quite a few celebrities’ radars. He didn’t even realize that SZA had started following him until a fan pointed it out. “I was like, ‘Oh really? Let me follow her back,’”He said, “Bashful.” Kalos then messaged SZA asking about possible collaboration. “She said yes,”He shares. “But I haven’t heard from her for like a month, so I don’t know what’s up with that. She’s probably busy — or ghosting me. But the fact that I can say I’m getting ghosted by SZA is cool.”

CANDLER, NC -- November 12, 2021:Noah Kalos stands for a portrait outside his home in Candler, North Carolina on Friday, November 12, 2021. Kalos is a mycologist and audio video synthesist in western North Carolina. CREDIT: Jacob Biba for Rolling Stone

Kalos recalls being fascinated with mushrooms at summer camp but was told it was not allowed. “Wilderness survival people were very mycophobic back then,”He said.

Jacob Biba, Rolling Stone

Netflix recently worked with him too; Kalos’ music is featured in Vivo, a children’s movie that the streaming company released this summer. “They had me connect some wildflowers to my synthesizer for that,”He said, explaining that the corporation was “afraid of the mushrooms” — even though they’re not psychedelic — in developing a kid-friendly project.

Kalos, who was born in Massachusetts, went on to study art at Oberlin College in Ohio. Fascinated by permaculture — a more low-tech, sustainable approach to agriculture — he sought out a good chunk of land he could call his own and ended up with about 1.7 acres a few hours outside of Asheville. With books by Sepp Holzer — the self-proclaimed “rebel farmer” — under Kalos’ arm, he took a job as a field instructor for a local wilderness therapy program.

He’s always loved the wild. Between college semesters, he was a camp counselor. And as a kid himself, he went to summer camp, where he learned about wilderness survival and started mushroom-foraging — much to his counselors’ dismay. “Wilderness survival people were very mycophobic back then,”He explained that many were afraid of eating the wrong mushroom, and could die as a result. “I think, in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a big shift in this country. A lot more people are getting out and foraging, and learning to identify mushrooms.”

Kalos isn’t wrong in thinking that public perception has changed. Thirteen years ago, renowned mycologist Paul Stamets led what’s become a wildly popular Ted Talk, “Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,”This video now has over three and a quarter million views YouTube. Stamets appears also in Fantastic FungiA cinematic documentary about the movie “The Killing,” narrated in part by Brie Larson (Oscar-winning actress), was released in 2019; it quickly received 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Johns Hopkins was awarded the This year, Johns Hopkins won the first federal grantIn 50 years, research has been conducted on psilocybin for its medicinal properties. Detroit was just this month DecriminalizedPsychoedelic mushrooms are following the lead of progressive cities such as Denver and Oakland as well as the state Oregon.

Kalos would like it to be known that his social media does not have anything to do with psychedelia. He’s more interested in making art from culinary-grade mushrooms and ingesting immune-boosting mushrooms. He even considered getting a tincture business off the ground, an idea he’s been forced to put on hold until he can create an out-of-home facility free of animal hair and other possible supplement pollutants. At the time, he was particularly interested in cordyceps. These parasitic mushrooms often grow on insects and are well-known in holistic communities for their ability to increase energy and strength, as well as fighting inflammation. “The idea originally was to turn this whole studio into a cordyceps growing room and kind of put the music away for a little bit just to make some money, get the family moved into a bigger house,” he says, referring to his wife and two kids — who are two and four, and whose art can be seen hanging on the wall behind Kalos’ head. “But I hit some red tape with being able to sell them because I’m drying them in a house with a dog and all that sort of stuff.”He decided to take advantage of social media as a potential new revenue source when it presented itself. “go with the flow.”

Kalos sees the multi-use potential of mushrooms, as do many others. Stamets is one example. Stella McCartney, fashion designer and vegan, views fungi as a great alternative to leather. McCartney unveiled the first ever mushroom-leather purse in Paris Fashion Week’s early October show. The material she used — made of mycelium, the root-like extensions of mushrooms — comes from a startup called Bolt Threads, which focuses on plant-based alternatives and has already partnered with Adidas, Lululemon, and Kering, as well as McCartney. For the fashion show, she hired Stamets to do the opening narration, but she also licensed Kalos’ bleeps and bloops. “I wanted to immerse viewers in an entirely sensory experience which led me to discover the incredible Noah Kalos, who was such a natural choice for the show soundtrack,”She said. “Noah’s practice is phenomenal.”

McCartney refers to the implementation “Mylo”Technology has made life easier “massive milestone” that’s been years in the making over email with Rolling Stone. She adds that she’s always experimenting with new materials for a more sustainable future but that a viewing of the Fantastic FungiShe was inspired by documentary: “It was a driving force in my creative process for the Summer 2022 collection.”

Kalos claims that McCartney is his lover. “might be doing some more work,” but that nothing’s been set. “There’s a potential that her dad might get involved, so that’s cool,” he says, holding back a smile while the pitch of his voice heightens as if he doesn’t want to jinx the situation. If Paul McCartney ends up remixing anything of his, he says, it’ll probably only be available inside a Stella McCartney event or store.

CANDLER, NC -- November 12, 2021:Noah Kalos connects an oyster mushroom to a synthesizer in his home in Candler, North Carolina on Friday, November 12, 2021. Kalos is a mycologist and audio video synthesist in western North Carolina. CREDIT: Jacob Biba for Rolling Stone

A connection being made in Kalos’ studio.

Jacob Biba, Rolling Stone

Kalos still creates content every day, even though he wants to hear from the Beatles legend. He also began applying his process to crystals which attracted the attention Lizzo. “More crystals plsss,”The pop star made a comment about A videoHe is seen playing with a carnelian. “I was excited about that,”He said.

Since mushrooms are alive, Kalos feels confident that he’s capturing fungal frequencies: The hardware is recording what’s called “electrodermal activity,” which is part of what’s measured when humans take a lie detector test. He admits that the crystal phenomenon is even more confusing. “A lot of times I don’t know if it’s the crystal or if it’s just picking up my Wi-Fi signals,”He laughs, appearing to be half-serious. “Now, what I do like to think is that maybe the crystal is somehow modifying the Wi-Fi interference in some ways — and that it’s an interaction. Also, in the wire that’s wrapping around it, there’s a frequency that goes through it, and that induces a magnetic field inside of the crystal — and the crystal is going to have resonant frequencies.”He said that creating a unique environment is key to success. “feedback” situation.

There’s no telling how much audio Kalos will end up sorting through by the time he finishes his next album, which he’s currently working on. An album was also released last year by Kalos, but it was just a collection of sounds. “This is going to be more like minimal techno,”He said. “Maybe get some bass music sounds… Maybe get a little psy trance-y.” He says a London-based record label contacted him about creating a full-length set this spring, but that they gave his tracks to another producer who took his art in an entirely different direction, so he’s decided to release independently.

“There is something about [Kalos’ process] that is so alien-like and trippy,”Teresa Egbert is a mushroom farmer and content writer who uses the hashtags Herbal.Visionz or Shroomy_Baby. She has also collaborated with Kalos. He recently recorded the biodata sonification she received from her finger being connected with resinous polypore mushrooms that were discovered while they were camping in the woods. “It’s like a form of communication from the mushroom in a musical way. It’s not something you see every day.”

Egbert admits that she doesn’t “fully understand” what’s happening in Her video, which came together when she ended up in North Carolina on a mushroom-hunting trip and realized that Kalos, who’s part of a cordyceps Facebook group that Egbert is in, lived nearby. “I know it’s something about electrical signals but I’d rather think that I am becoming One with the mushroom overlords when we are connected through the synth,”She smiles and nods. Egbert, a bit of an explorer, is often on the road searching for other people. “mushroom nerds”Learn from and hike with.

The mushroom community is rapidly growing, much like the organisms it celebrates. The “mushtok”#Hashtag has been viewed 52.5 million times on TikTok. This number could have been lowered by TikTok. “From like March to April, I didn’t know what was going on,” Kalos says. “Old videos of mine would get flagged and removed.”He believes that TikTok employees misclassified the mushrooms he uses. “I would appeal them and email, and sometimes I’d get them brought back up and other times not. One time, I got an email saying, ‘Oh yeah, we checked your profile and it’s all good,’ but they never put the video back up.”

Kalos says videos about lion’s mane — which is used in various homeopathic remedies — were being considered advertisements for “illegal goods and services.” While lion’s mane is far from illegal, Kalos admits that he “may have accidentally caused a lion’s mane shortage last year.” He says that a reporter contacted him about a story on a lion’s mane farmer, who said a TikTok surge was likely to blame for their inability to keep the product on shelves. “If you look at TikTok, and you see lion’s mane, and I have a video with like five million views about how it regrows brain cells…”He just shrugs. Luckily, though, lion’s mane literally does grow on trees.

And Kalos doesn’t think that the demand will drain the supply. Kalos says his DMs fill up with inquiries about building at-home laboratories. “Honestly, I’m not sure what’s growing faster — the people who want to start a mushroom business or the people who are consuming the mushrooms.”

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