#rivertones

The first part of that answer is a series of fortuitous connections. Buttress worked on the project with Dr. Martin Bencsik, an expert in bee communication, and was so struck by the deep thrum of the hive that he decided to create a soundtrack for the piece. Bencsik’s wife Deirdre, a classically trained cellist, was able to find a register that went with the 40,000 bees in the installation (they buzz in C, apparently), and was joined by Kev Bales and Tony Foster (who have played with Spiritualized, Julian Cope, etc). For “The Hive,” the one track here that has vocals, Buttress’s daughter Camille improvised some lyrics. Others were prevailed upon to add their own input (Iceland avant-chamber outfit amiina and Foster and Bales’ old boss Jason Pierce), but the bees also wound up included in more surprising and significant ways than just the warm, ever-present buzz you get when dealing with a hive. The recurring bits here that sound a bit like unusual animal sounds, or maybe a malfunctioning robotic puppy? Those, too, are parts of the vocabulary of bees. And many of the human generated sounds, whether lap steel or Mellotron, wound up using a system of noises gates that means they become part of the flow of the music when triggered by the bees. 

So what’s under the hood on One is interesting enough, but you might wonder how it actually sounds? The opening 19-minute “The Journey” frequently feels like a bit of a cross between the hymnal, pastoral atmospherics of Mountains’ earliest, most field-recording dependent work and (especially when the bees summon that lap steel) something like the rural roadside ambience of the KLF’s Chill Out (minus the radio stations). The parts where Pierce’s guitar and harmonica poke through suggest how lovely his more drone- or repetition-based work would be even if it never actually achieved the explosion he tends to build towards, but mostly he just sounds like part of the fabric. Bencsik’s cello and amiina’s other strings wind up taking what center stage there is much of a time, but always with the richly satisfying underlay that, well, you only really get with 40,000 bees. After “The Journey” the second half of the album splits into three relatively shorter tracks, of which the foreboding “The Hive” with its simultaneously dispassionate and strongly stirring vocals makes the biggest impression. 

If a listener didn’t know the provenance of the music on One, it would still be a perfectly enjoyable and engrossing album of rich drone, as patient and well-judged and frequently moving as many examples made solely by humans. If anything, the richness of the strings and how well they go with the bees means that One might be more immediately ingratiating or traditionally ‘beautiful’ than many of its peers. But it’s 2016, and while we’ve all got the death of the author firmly under our belts it’s also long past the time when we’ve been able to admit that context does actually make a difference (just not the difference, at least in all cases), and Be’s work has some awfully fascinating context. You can try and picture how this music would work walking through The Hive in person, or contemplate the fact that music made at least somewhat along the cycles and activities of bees instead of with human artistic intent in mind still winds up feeling pretty consonant, or just marvel a little at the processes that went into making this album. In any case, what’s here is good enough to make you hope they can somehow keep the interspecies ensemble together for future efforts.