Bluedot Volume1

BE – ONE
T
he humble bee: life-spring of nature, ruiner of
picnics, coloniser of Soleros and now, ticking
off some species-wide bucket list, rock star. As
anyone who’s ever been in The Fall will tell you,
40,000 insects can make better bandmates
than some musicians and, last year, Wolfgang Buttress set
out to do just that. Tasked with building a pavilion on the
topic of Feeding The Planet, Energy For Life for the Expo
2015 exhibition in Milan, the Nottingham-based artist
decided to focus on the plight of the bee, constructing a
17-metre-high latticework sculpture called The Hive.
“The honey bee is responsible for 30 per cent of
the food we eat but it’s in crisis because of pesticides,
the lack of biodiversity and monoculture,” he explains.
“Rather than express it as a spectacle I wanted to express
it as an experience. Inside this structure of The Hive was
linked to a real beehive back in Nottingham and inside
this real beehive we put things called accelerometers,
which measure vibrations. Through these vibrations they
send digital signals so we know what’s happening in
real time inside the colony. We know whether the hive
is busy, quiet, healthy, unhealthy. I had this idea that it’d
be amazing if you could send these digital signals to a
sculpture over in Milan and these would be expressed as
light or sound. When you’re in The Hive, you’re inside the
experience, you were feeling almost what it’s like to be a
bee inside a hive.”
But what, went the logical thought progression, if the
bees were holding a jam festival? What if they could make
the bees rock? Upon first lifting open a bee frame, Buttress
was met with a low, visceral drone hum akin to a honeymaking
Sunn 0))), and the musical possibilities struck him.
“It was really deep, this amazing drone, and you get
drones in cultures all over the world, from Aborigines to
Eastern European music. It was an incredible sound, so I
wanted to try to express this hum.” He gathered friends
and the Nottingham hive’s owner – researcher Dr Martin
Bencsik of Nottingham Trent University – into a studio
streaming the sound of the bees and the magic that
would become the mesmerising album Be One began
to spark. Bencsik’s wife Deirdre, a classically trained
cellist, noted that the bees were humming in the key of C
and began playing along; Wolfgang’s daughter Camille
started singing accompaniment. “Really quickly we had
this amazing triangle of sound,” Wolfgang recalls, “the
human voice, the sound of the bees, the sound of the
cello, the most amazing sound.”
Experimental rock artists swarmed (as it were) to the
project. When guitarist Tony Foster played the bees’
music in Spiritualized’s studio, Jason Pierce offered
his services on auto-harp, harmonium and guitar and
helped recruit Sigur Rós’ string section Amiina to the
cause. It’s a wonder no one asked noted pro-bee
campaigner Liam Gallagher to get involved. “I didn’t
know he was into bees,” Wolfgang says, “I’ll have to
look into that!”
With such star power in their backing band, the bees
needed to assert their position at the top of the bill. So
Buttress worked out a way they could actually play their
own instruments. “We recorded a whole series of musical
stems in the key of C, some violin parts, piano parts, a
Mellotron, some vocals. In the Pavilion in Milan, at certain
thresholds, certain frequencies, a noise gate would be
opened by the energy of the bees back in Nottingham.
Depending on the pitch it could be a violin, a guitar or a
piano. We knew everything would be in harmony in the
key of C, but it was completely fluid and fairly random
in terms of human intervention. One of the most amazing
things was the sense of letting go. In a way it was the
bees who were choosing the symphony.”
By then feeding the music the bees were making back
into the hive, they created a cross-species version of
Africa Express. “We think bees are virtually deaf, so we
modulated some of the sounds, turned them back into
vibrations, and then put an accelerometer back into the
beehive to see how they would react to the music we
were playing. If bees are scared or unhappy they tend
to freeze, go very static and silent. But when we started
playing the music back to them they started reacting
back to it and you can hear some little tonal vibrations
reacting to some of the music. This is the next part of the
experimentation, to have this circular, almost jazz way of
writing music with the bees. The sound of the bees would
be played, the musicians would react to it, it’d go back
into the beehive and the bees could potentially react to
that, the whole thing is a circle.”
“One of the most amazing things
was the sense of letting go. In away
it was the bees who were choosing
the symphony”
At bluedot, Wolfgang promises a “very immersive,
slightly trippy” audio-visual
experience whereby the
album’s musicians play along to
a live, surround-sound feed of
bees accompanied by thermal
images from the hive projected
onto netting.
Has he checked it’s not
mating season? You might end
up with every bee in a 10-mile
radius descending on the gig.
Wolfgang laughs. “That might happen, but when they
do swarm, they don’t sting you. We collected a swarm
recently to put them inside a cello, and they’ll swarm
all over you but never sting you because the only thing
they’re interested in is finding a new home or having sex.
So if they do come in it’d be amazing, but they wouldn’t
harm the audience.”
It promises to be the buzz gig of the weekend (sorry),
but what’s next for Wolfgang? The Beetles, surely? “We’re
doing some stuff with the same musicians again, working
with vibrations. The next one, the bass is coming from
the earth, so we’re working with the national geological
society, putting seismic meters into the earth to create
the bass. Then we’re working with NASA on this other
project where we’ve got two satellites on the sun 24-7
and we’re getting signals from the flares on the sun,
they’re creating the high end, the treble. The audience
will be the interface between the bass of the earth and
the treble from the sun.”
Cosmic, dude…
wolfgangbuttress.com
WRITTEN BY MARK BEAUMONT
ORBIT STAGE
SUNDAY
34 | EXPLORE