Genre: Experimental / Electronic
Track Listing:
01 First Song
02 Facing Up to the Facts
03 Tis
04 God is So Good, God is SO Dub
05 Warm and Fuzzy
06 Something too
07 Kurt Said To Me
08 I Think I’m Chinese
09 Sad For Mark
10 Phil’s Zombie Party
11 On Crested Isles
12 YouSayWannaGo
13 I See Your Light Dying
14 To Be Present
Bee Hatch is the latest project of Phil Western and Mark Spybey, who made fast friends after meeting in Vancouver when they were in Download. That was 10 years ago. In the interregnum, each has kept busy, doing their own things, Phil, still working on and off with Download and Plateau, as well as other projects. Mark Spybey, also a member of the experimental group, Zoviet-France, has released a couple of albums under the names Dead Voices on Air and Reformed Faction (the latter with fellow Zoviet-France members). He also honed his craft and worked with a fantasy list, collaborating with influencing people in his life including members from Can and Faust.
According to their MySpace bio, this project, Bee Hatch, was the result of a telephone conversation between the two old music partners and friends. But they didn’t actually have to get in physical contact to do this CD. It was recorded between Los Angeles and the Northeast of England, done via internet file-sharing. The whole thing took, surprisingly, only a month to finish.
The music itself is experimental to the core. The songs range from the surreal to the dehumanized machine-powered brain, to funky, drum machine-driven, Kraftwerk-style stuff, like “Warm and Fuzzy”.
Throughout this musical laboratory experiment that is this eponymous CD, you feel like you are floating in space, while, say, lying in bed, in a meditative state, with this disc blaring through perfect speakers or on great headphones. One quote that sticks out in their bio, regarding their approach to making music was so apt and right on that I couldn’t help but quote it here to give a good description of where they’re coming from: “Nothing is clear. Everything is possible. Accidents are encouraged. Music is a series of holes waiting to be filled. Walls are your best friends, play music for walls. The drummer is always right.”
Another positive thing about Bee Hatch is that, unlike a lot of new, modern-day post-industrial/dark ambient, etc bands, Bee Hatch’s eponymous debut doesn’t all sound like one long metallic shimmying and dripping noises or whatever, they actually shake things up somewhat, while still staying well within their “genre”. For instance: take the aforementioned “Warm and Fuzzy” - that is the first really uptempo cut on the CD - the songs before it are more fluid and ethereal but when you get to “Warm and Fuzzy” you are bowled over - “is this the same disc?” you may wonder, but it is the same. Also, a variety is made evident just going from “Kurt Said To Me”, a wild, rhythmic sensation, to “I Think I’m Chinese”, which is more foreign sounding to Western ears - it has a lot of so-called “traditional Chinese” music in it, mixed-up, though, with other, more experimental, less traditional sounds and methods, but then, after that, “Sad For Mark” goes another way still.
One could go on and on, extolling the virtues and the diversities on this CD, but suffice it to say, there is a lot going on in the heads of these two cats and, after you listen to their self-titled debut for a while, just when you think that there’s nothing else worth waiting for - hear this: expect a new Bee Hatch LP to come out in a couple months after this one - it’ll be called “Brood”. For now, though, there’s plenty of busy-ness on Bee-Hatch to keep you occupied for now.
