Totnes cellist Ben Roberts launches revolutionary ‘Transition’ project

6th June 2025 Andy Hill

First single Feeling Is The New Thinking sets an ambitious tone

Totnes-based avant-garde cellist and composer Ben Roberts unveils the first stage of a wildly ambitious new venture this week: TRANSITION, a multi-layered album and performance series exploring personal and societal change. The opening single, “Feeling Is The New Thinking,” arrives today (Friday, 6 June) and offers a vivid glimpse of the sonic and philosophical terrain ahead.

Driven by a pizzicato hook that swells from meditative murmur to cinematic crescendo, the track pairs cavernous reverb with dance-leaning rhythms, creating what one listener called “music for a psychedelic journey.” Roberts’ playing pushes his instrument to “the crying, uncannily human lamentation” heard in his live shows, while subtle electronics pulse beneath like a heartbeat.

“With Feeling Is The New Thinking I want to help us move away from a culture that lives mainly in the head,” Roberts explains. “It’s an invitation to drop into the body’s innate intelligence – to tune into the quiet signals of heart, gut and skin – and integrate those deeper senses beyond left-brain logic and reason.”

A project about journeys

Roberts describes TRANSITION as “a reflection on the inner and outer metamorphoses we’re all navigating right now – my own path from classical cellist to experimental composer, my growth as a father, and society’s leap from a cosy past into an unimaginable future.”

The releases will be accompanied by shows and listening rituals designed to ground audience

s in the same somatic awareness the music champions.

Local dates

Totnes listeners can catch the new material live at two intimate shows next month — Hairy Barista, Totnes (15 June) and Oxford House, Plymouth (9 June, under Roberts’ Sonic Ritual moniker with life partner Stephanie Lisa Kelly) – before a show at Brighton’s Rose Hill on 28 June.