Sally Rodgers takes in ‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ at Liverpool World Museum, and Karman Line Collective’s accompanying soundtrack.
Here’s a lovely word for you: melittology. It means the study of bees, but unlike apiology which focuses on the study of how honeybees relate to their environment and the wider ecosystem, melittology considers all the bee species in what’s known as a clade (evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor). In this instance it’s the clade Anthophila – roughly 20,000 different species of bees. Giant bees, tiny bees, honeybees, bumblebees, carpenter, mason and leafcutter bees – our pollinating friends who have, over millions of years, evolved, adapted and attuned themselves to their environment. Creatures whose population size and wellbeing are linked, intrinsically, to the health of our planet’s ecosystems. Of the many pressing claims on our efforts at ecological activism, bees and their survival should, I’m sure you’ll agree, be high on our list of priorities.
Karman Line Collective’s new album, To Be, builds and develops on an earlier collaboration between the artist Wolfgang Buttress, drummer Kevin Bales and guitarist Tony ‘Doggen’ Foster of Spiritualized. Those earlier recordings, released as the album ONE on Caught By the River’s Rivertones label in 2016, were created to soundtrack Buttress’s award-winning installation The Hive at Kew Gardens. Here, the artists’ colony has expanded to include vocalist Camille Christel, Deirdre Bencsik on cello, Robert Howard (guitar), David Harris (trumpet), Ian Downing (saw) and the reactive and recursive technological wizardry of Justin Goodyer. Ramping up the melittological lexicon of that earlier musical outing, To Be was made to augment and intensify Buttress’s astonishing exhibition, Bees: A Story of Survival, now showing at Liverpool’s World Museum.
As artists, Steve and I have done a fair bit of museum sound and so it’s fair, I think, to observe that it’s often backgrounded. Sometimes described with that dread term ‘gallery enabling’, the brief is often to subtly enhance the visitor experience without making too much noise about it. But here the sound is loud, disorientating, kinetic and mesmerising. Just like the journey we’re taken on as we navigate Buttress’s fascinating, sensorial manifestations of bee-hood. So, when Caught by the River asked me if I’d review the album, I wanted to see for myself if To Be stands up as both a fundamental narrative device within the exhibition’s network of immersive installations, and as a stand-alone listening experience.
On the train on the way to Liverpool to see the exhibition, my friend, a visual-arts rather than a music kind of person said, “I’ve never heard of Spiritualized, what are they like?” and I said, “they’re like a more underground, culty version of The Verve, without Richard Ashcroft, big schwanging, soupy guitars” and to illustrate I struck my low-slung air guitar and wanged my imaginary wammy bar. What’s notable about this soundtrack is the creative integrity of that sonic vision is preserved and utilised in a sensory mix that illuminates, and allows us ingress into, the world of bees.
At the heart of To Be is a remarkable set of field recordings that capture the sounds of bees in their hives. In fact, a field recording is only ever as good as the remarkable thing it’s captured – Kulaha Lumpur at night, singing frogs in Uruguay, a rainforest, a lyrebird and so on – and there can be few sounds on earth more remarkable than that of tens of thousands of bees going about their important, daily business. These ever-changing frequencies – what melittologists describe as ‘tooting, quacking and purring’ – are a constant as the work traverses its different movements, rising, falling and intensifying in sonorous partnership with the bee story Buttress wants us to experience. Through gloriously sculptural zones and portals we encounter dream states in a flower meadow, metal plates vibrating with bee communications we can actually feel, and Chladni-like pattern generators transposing bee vibrations into sacred geometries. With scientific precision we encounter the colony as eggs, then pupae, as queen bees, worker bees and in mating balls. We learn that when bees fly, an electrostatic charge is generated which causes pollen (the male genetic material for plant reproduction) to stick to their hairy legs. Hopping from flower to flower in their little pollen pants, we learn that more than three quarters of the world’s food crops are dependent on their activity. As Buttress himself says at the outset of this journey:
‘Our existence is transient – short lived. We travel through space and time, on a journey, passing through. Like cosmic dust or pollen particles, we exist in space. There is a beautiful connection between everyone and everything.’
The exhibition begins in a darkened room full of top-tier, educational interactives and the accompanying sound, the album’s opening track ‘Melittology’, introduces a palette of haunting yet hopeful cello melodies, low drones and skittering tronics. Processed through Spiritualized’s signature guitar pedals, vintage amps and fancy sidechains, this hypnotic auditory soup is charged with the bees’ whoops and warbles, popping and fizzing like you’re listening to your own synapses. Like you’re entering the bee state.
As we move through the installations, guided by the pollen trail of a single bee, ghost voices appear with Celtic clarity, slow cymbal rolls like bursts of light open into layered string arrangements, low guitar and bass melodies, the elements bubbling, a flutter of birdsong, the bees as wind across the tundra. Through Buttress’s sculptural, mirrored rooms and tunnels of video walls we imbibe the sounds of a flower meadow at dusk, midday and dawn. Floating on beds of choral ambience, melodic drones, bowed strings and singing saws, we digest the fact that since the 1930s the UK has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows.
In the zone Buttress has named ‘Be’, he explores the extraordinary structure of the hive, and the equivalent album track introduces distortion and static. He wants us to imagine the world from the bee’s perspective as the sound of buzzing cymbals intensifies. Here we learn about bee communications – a honeybee’s rhythmic tapping to gee up the hive’s activity (dorsoventral abdominal vibrations) or a forager bee’s calls for help with a heavy load (forager worker pipe). The audio, infused with these sounds, stuttering choral vocalisations and rhythmic thrumming, builds to a crescendo – abstract, drilling, pulsing. On ‘Swarm’, a solo cello evolves into oscillating organ stabs. Analogue frequencies swim over and under flute like drones, bowed and stretched across enveloping resonant chambers like honeycomb. Shimmering lights scatter and disperse as a gentle breeze blows around a 3D sculpture made of ribbons, suspended in a darkened room.
As we enter the penultimate installation, ‘Vanishing’, we’re reminded that although bees are survivors that can thrive in deserts, wetlands and forests, climate change, pesticides, loss of habitat and air pollution are among the threats they face. That without them, our fragile world will fall apart. The soundtrack here is of melancholic cello motifs drifting in a sea of textural noise, falling away as images of cut flowers decay on a triptych made of gauzy screens, teasels and acoustic baffles.
By the time we reach the final installation, ‘Symphony’, I’m feeling overwhelmed and have to have a sit-down. It’s the best kind of overload though. A primal, atomic suffusion that has crept over me on this bee journey which culminates in this wonderful interactive room. While bee sounds are processed into flecks, glimmers and particles of light that react to your body’s movement (we danced), the symphony reaches its apotheosis. Sounds coalesce in a cosmic soup of distorted, granulated friction, vibration, catgut on string. There’s a familiar, more recognisably human energy on this bee/band collab. More of Spiritualized’s psychedelic fire – shredding pedals, soaring Floyd-like choral voices, modular synthesis, percussive feedback. But still the bees – always the bees.
It’s all so beautifully done. Ending as it does on a hopeful note, it encourages us to cherish bees. I’m not sure ‘soundtrack’ or ‘soundscape’ are adequate terms to describe these recordings. It implies a separation from the art, where here the sound is integral. Sure, you can buy the album on Bandcamp, put your headphones on, lie down in a field and enjoy it. But bound up in a creative huddle with Buttress and his team of scientists, technologists, sound and light specialists, the musician’s contribution to the hive’s activity is made essential. Go see / hear / feel it if you can. But maybe more importantly, plant native plants that bees like, lobby for conservation, embrace untidy, wildlife friendly gardening. I’m doing no-mow summer (which is seriously messing with my OCD) but my tiny garden is full of bees, and it makes me happy knowing even my small efforts are supporting their story of survival.
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‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ is on display at Liverpool World Museum until 28th September 2025. More information here.
‘To Be’ by Karman Line Collective is available to buy digitally and on vinyl here, via Bandcamp.