While most Memphians know Sean Murphy as the Sousaphone-playing leader of the funky Mighty Souls Brass Band, specializing in New Orleans-adjacent grooves in classic street parade style, there’s a lot more to his musicality than that. Followers of his social media accounts know this, having seen his daily posts throughout 2025 tagged #improvisationismeditation or #spontaneouscomposition, all 365 of them featuring Murphy freestyling on various instruments conducive to contemplative states of mind, like the overtone-laden Fujara, a Slovakian shepherd’s flute, not to mention various ocarinas, drums, kalimbas, and other instruments.
Those excursions are every bit as fundamental to Murphy’s musical DNA as the Mighty Souls’ brassy funk. This makes sense when you realize that he devoted his studies at the University of Memphis as much to ethnomusicology as performance, seeking not only otherworldly instruments, but otherworldly states of mind.
All that will be especially apparent when “1Breath” Murphy, with special guest Bhakti Lam-Mu (Art Edmaiston), presents a “vibrational soundscape” at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Sunday, February 8th at 6 p.m. Weaving sonic tapestries with didgeridoos, saxophone, tuba, gongs, flutes, kalimbas, drums, bells, bowls, and more, this sound meditation journey will be more than a concert, but also a wellness practice for relaxation and self-care. Some listeners have described Sean’s improvisations as “sound acupuncture” and “a cell-altering shamanic journey.”
And it’s a great listen. The performance, while improvised, will also emulate his latest album, Ambient Light, released on the same day and available for purchase on vinyl at the show. Not long after, on February 13th, the Memphis Listening Lab will play the LP through its high-fidelity sound system at what may be the most relaxing listening event in the lab’s history.
It all comes naturally to Murphy, who’s been delving into extemporaneous ambient soundscapes for nearly a quarter century now. “I played music for dance classes at the U of M right after I graduated,” he says. “And then I helped Ondine Geary start a weekly [dance and music] improv group. We just called it ‘Improv.’ There was no structure to the class; we would just show up and it would be a happening. That’s how I met Anne. She was there pretty much from the beginning.”
That would be Anne Froning, Murphy’s wife and partner in business, art, and mixology. Together, they run Being:Art, a company dedicated to making outdoor marimbas, xylophones, and the like for playgrounds, schools, and other public spaces. They’ve long shared a charmed life somewhere at the intersection of meditation, dance, and homesteading. Murphy’s latest projects are simply the latest manifestation of that.
As Murphy writes in the album notes, “In my experimental music I seem to always come back to environments.” His 2013 album, Sketches of Crosstown, recorded in the empty Sears building before Crosstown Arts renovated it, is the perfect example: the building’s echo and reverb itself becomes an instrument, along with Murphy and collaborator Jim Spake. Or, as Murphy further writes, “Then there are the compositions that are environments (Imbolc Ice, 2023). This latter concept was the starting point for this album.”
Imbolc, the day marking the transition from winter to spring every February 2nd on the Celtic calendar, drew something unique out of Murphy and his collaborators that year. “It was snowing on that Imbolc day, and so our normal Wednesday night improv didn’t happen. So, me and Anne and our friend Nat Newburger got together and did improv, just the three of us at the house,” with Froning and Newburger contributing dance movements while Murphy freestyled the music. “I had a whole effects processor set up on my baby grand piano, and that was what came out of it, improvising dance with piano and effects. And I loved what was created so much that I decided to just release it.”
That’s one of many titles available on Murphy’s Bandcamp page. “I think I’ve got, like, seven or eight solo recordings of this kind that I’ve put out,” he says. “But even before I started recording this kind of stuff, I was still really intrigued by that approach. Because as an undergraduate I got introduced to John Cage, John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, all those experimental composers. And that was my first step into that world. Then I got involved with creating music for dance, primarily modern dance, and then I hooked up with Anne, and we started doing yoga with live music. And that really gave me an opportunity to start experimenting with electronics and all the different instruments that I play. And somewhere along the line, I learned about John Hassell. A great Memphian!”
Hassell, a globe-hopping trumpeter who pioneered a blend of improvised music and electronic effects that led to his collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno (on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, among other works), inspired Murphy to blend acoustic instruments with subtle electronics. But Tom Heasley was an even greater inspiration. “Tom Heasley is a tuba player that does ambient music through creating drones and stuff,” explains Murphy. “He’s got two or three records out, starting in the ’90s. It was just really fascinating, and very much in parallel with what I was already doing. So I got a lot of ideas from him, and then at some point somebody introduced me to Music for Airports.”
That 1979 Brian Eno album, also known as Ambient 1, helped popularize music designed to occupy space more at the back of your mind than the front, and Murphy is forthright about its influence on him. Indeed, the first piece on Ambient Light, “Buoyancy,” is, he notes, “a response and tribute to Eno’s ‘1/1’ from Ambient 1. It is an improvisation for piano, digital tape loops, and digital delay.”
“I love the ocean. I feel like that really comes through in a lot of the environments I create.”
That title, it turns out, also evokes the world Murphy was always aspiring to visit through such music. “For a little while,” he says, “I was into the idea of deep sea diving, and that was where the pieces ‘Ambient Light’ and ‘Buoyancy’ came from — oceanic things. I’ve never been deep sea diving, but I’ve always wanted to. I’m just fascinated by it. I love the ocean. I feel like that really comes through in a lot of the environments that I create.”