Oh BeeHive!



Listening to From Gardens Where We Feel Secure by Virginia Astley

I first bought this album on vinyl just after it had come out, purely because I liked the cover. It still floats around in the garage with its other 12” comrades, still with its cellophane wrapper. I got some funny looks when I mentioned having it to my fellow students who, though they had heard of it, had visions of fey and weedy hello-clouds-hello-sky types. Maybe I was fey and weedy but the strangeness of this album belies its flowery cover. The backwards samples and general weird use of environmental sounds as the percussion make it a fitting soundtrack for the hangover from The Midwich Cuckoos. The sound of oars in rowlocks is especially good and the alarm clock and owl on the last track are so evocative. Virginia Astley’s other, more vocal work has recently become a bit flat compared to the stuff from the early eighties. The album Hope In A Darkened Heart was a very slick collection with a re-recording of the second track from Gardens, all produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto which, because of the icy feel, lost some of the Englishness. I seem to remember a link with William Blake – one of her albums is called Had I the Heavens - but I think there was something else to it. So much more on Wikipedia.

I thought I had mentioned my current reading in yesterday’s entry but I was wrong. It is The Hive by an author who dared to write a book about bees despite being called Bee Wilson. This book is more about humans and their relationship to Bess rather than about the ways of bees themselves. It splits into various sections on Sex, Politics etc and ends with a chapter about Beekeepers which immediately gave the me idea that this was like the appearance of God in the lives of Human beings. Are domestic bees in any way aware that they are kept by an entity outside their own biology? Of course they are not. The book goes into detail of how the details of bees lives have been understood over the years – it was only recently that humans accepted that the hive was headed by a female rather than a ‘King Bee’ – and how hives have been used to promote every type of society from Monarchy, through anarchy to communism and beyond. Humans have brains more able to understand things outside their own immediate experience so we cannot really compare man and bees but the idea of a controlling influence outside perceived existence is a useful element. I will return to Mr Dawkins on completion of this despite being aware of a certain unwelcome preachiness that has crept in the The Ancestor’s Tale.

I have a number of short sentences in my notebook. The last of them is ‘Andy Pandy Ambience’ which refers to the Watch With Mother video which The Small Boy chose as his preferred viewing at the weekend. It is strange how the TV executive decide that everything should be updated to cater for what they perceive as being the current fashion for children’s television and despite this, a less-than-two-year-old can be held rapt for 30 minutes by a scratchy, black-and-white show recorded before his father was born. What struck me, apart from the delicious glassy accent of the Narrator of Andy Pandy, were the various knockings and clunkings that could be heard in the many silences (they wouldn’t be allowed these days). It seemed that, the narration was recorded in spare moments while all about, the BBC sceneshifters got on with there normal work. It reminded me of the sound of those school benches being shifted inexpertly by groups of small children. Sometimes I could hear what might have been buses or the general hum and roar of urban activity. It reminds of the recent complaint of historians, that digital photography is removing a great source of background for the future as people delete all bad photographs. The same happens with sound. Technology has allowed us to create pristine sound tracks, where all that comes in is the relevant speech and any artificial ambience that the director and the foley artist decide is required to paint the picture. We should make simple field recordings just to keep what the sound of the current world is like. And with that, we are back at the start – the ambient sounds of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. Life is a circle.