Acclaimed Totnes cellist brings “mind-expanding” cello soundbath to St Mary’s

BBC Radio 3-featured musician Ben Roberts and facilitator Steph Kelly will transform St Mary’s Church into an immersive three-hour Sonic Ritual, blending live cello, multi-instrumental sound journey and contemporary ceremony. On the evening of Thursday May 14, something extraordinary will happen inside St Mary’s Church. The pews will be cleared. Cushions and blankets will take their place. And Totnes cellist Ben Roberts will begin to play.

Sonic Ritual: Ascension is a three-hour immersive sound journey conceived by Ben and his creative and life partner, facilitator Steph Kelly – and this is its most ambitious incarnation yet. Where previous Sonic Ritual sessions have taken place at Bowden House’s intimate Angel Hall, the move to St Mary’s signals something bigger: a full evening of electric and acoustic cello, vocal harmonies, electric guitar, harmonium, improvisation and ceremony in one of Totnes’ most resonant and beautiful spaces.

Audiences are invited not to sit politely in rows, but to lie down, get comfortable and allow the music to move through them. Whether that sounds like a concert, a meditation, or something harder to name is rather the point.

Ben is known locally as a restlessly inventive musician – classically trained, punk in spirit, and increasingly hard to categorise. His Vibrator show at this very church drew comparisons to an “uncanny spiritual awakening” from CLASH magazine, and his album Transition – an exploration of inner and outer change through cinematic, somatic cello – earned him a place on BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks, no small thing for a Totnes-based independent artist.

Sonic Ritual grew from that same impulse: the belief that music can do something more than entertain. That it can reach into the body. That a room full of people listening together can become, briefly, something greater than the sum of its parts.

“It’s not just a concert where people sit and consume music,” says Ben. “The audience and performers grow together in the same energetic field. The music is dynamic, responsive to the people and energies present in the room.”

Steph Kelly holds the human architecture around that vision. A writer, artist, certified coach and Way of Council practitioner, her facilitation gives the evening its shape: a gentle opening circle to arrive and settle, the long arc of the sound journey itself, and a closing circle to return. It is,

in her own words, an invitation to “attune to our inner reality in the moment“.

Those who’ve attended previous sessions speak of it in the slightly dazed language of people who weren’t quite expecting what they got. “Deeply peaceful and grounding.” “Utterly transformative.” “Like sonic surgery.” One person described a sense of “the elasticity of time” – of having drifted into infinity while the cello played.

The poster for the evening calls it “a contemporary shamanic experience“. Anyone nervous of that framing is encouraged to set those feelings aside. At its core, Sonic Ritual: Ascension is a live music event of real seriousness and beauty, in a church that seems to have been waiting for exactly this – three hours of something strange, still, and genuinely worth turning up for.

Sonic Ritual: Ascension takes place on Thursday May 14, 7pm–10pm, at St Mary’s Church, Totnes. Tickets are £30 full price, £25 early bird, £15 concession. More information and booking at dandelion.events and mysticalpunk.com.