{"id":139,"date":"2020-05-02T12:21:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T12:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/?p=139"},"modified":"2020-05-02T12:21:40","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T12:21:40","slug":"the-beekeeper-who-makes-synth-music-with-his-bee-colonies-english-listening-and-reading-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies (English Listening and Reading Practice)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Download or stream the audio file here >><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Bioni Samp translates bee behaviors and sounds into electronic music to help raise awareness of the ecological issues threatening them.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Tinkering with retro synthesizers is nothing new\u2014but beekeeper Bioni Samp isn\u2019t your typical oscillator geek. He records and analyzes the frequencies of his bees, such as the soothing \u201csongs\u201d queen bees chirp to their hives, and uses them in his compositions. He wields a hive frame \u201cscanner\u201d to pick up electromagnetic smog and sticks electrodes in his homegrown honey to reap its rich, viscous sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bioni (pronounced BEE-own-ee) Samp\u2019s music is abstract, glitchy, and noisy, not unlike Throbbing Gristle or Nurse With Wound, but often rhythmic, and dancey as well, kinda like if Aphex Twin was really into bugs. Samp\u2014whose real name is a secret\u2014lives in North London, acting as a kind of urban bee shaman. Now in his early 50s, he\u2019s been an apiarian enthusiast since he was seven and now performs wearing a stereotypical beekeeping suit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his music, Samp hopes to raise awareness of colony collapse disorder, the plague that has killed millions of honeybee hives worldwide. Billions of bees die each year, due to a combination of Varroa<\/em> mite infestations, climate change, and pesticides such as neonicotinoids. But while bringing awareness to this delicate issue is Samp\u2019s goal, he isn\u2019t preachy about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I went around with a Greenpeace badge on and started shouting about deforestation, people quickly tire of that, it doesn’t really connect with people,\u201d Samp says over video chat. \u201cSo I worked around the idea of presenting something that’s got an underlying ecological message, but it’s put over in a way which interest geeks and people interested in electronic music and computing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His art and sound installations have travelled across the globe, performing at environmentally-conscious festivals and art galleries as far flung as Slovakia, Poland, Canada, Austria, and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the U.K., beekeeping is kind of like a gentleman’s hobby\u2014it’s not quite seen seriously like it is there in Central Europe,\u201d Samp says. \u201cSo when I go to like Czechia, I get interviewed in the national papers, I’m seen as an important artist. I met somebody there and they said their father even knew of me and he was about 80.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samp\u2019s gear is part function, part symbolic. For example, one of his setups has three oscillators, representing the hierarchy of a hive: one for the workers, one for the drones, one for the queen. Some of his other bizarre, original instrument creations include the Electronic Beesmoker, BeeVerb, BFX, and the Binaural Beeframe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apart from his custom-made hardware, Samp also employs numerology in his compositions, using the detailed logs from his beehive diaries as inputs on digital synthesizer programs like Max\/MSP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can put a tray in a beehive with a kind of graph pattern on and then look at how many Varroa<\/em> mites have fallen through the mesh floor onto this sheet of paper,\u201d Samp explains. \u201cYou can use the kind of numerology to make sounds\u2026I put in numbers like how long it’s been since the queen laid some eggs and some drones appeared in the hive. I started typing all these numbers in and I have music being created.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a real breakthrough came to Samp when he discovered honey could be used as a resistor, which limits electrical flow through a circuit, adjusting the otherworldly sound of his homemade Hive Synthesizer. He first tried this with propolis, a type of tree resin that bees use as glue in their hives, but it didn\u2019t work nearly as well. \u201cI liked the idea that having an organic element,\u201d Samp says. \u201cNot being all electronics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many beekeepers, Samp talks to his insects, and even meditates on their soothing buzz. Likewise, he speaks with a relaxing, droning British accent that could induce ASMR in some people\u2014it certainly seemed to in me. Samp says every colony has its own personality, like a dog\u2014his bees can be moody when it rains and don\u2019t really tolerate other people besides himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s bizarre, you know, bees got as good a smell as a bloodhound and they know my smell,\u201d Samp says. \u201cWhen somebody else comes along with aftershave on or perfume, they hate that\u2014they really try and sting them. They also hate mobile phones\u2026when my phone rings they try and sting my pocket. They really don’t like the hot frequencies from mobile phones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samp was the subject of a 360\u00ba BBC mini-documentary, The Resistance of Honey<\/em>, which was nominated for the Raindance Film Festival’s Best VR Sound Design Experience. It acts as a kind of day-in-the-life of the beekeeper, showing his studio and the bee house he co-designed and built, housing three different colonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once, a film festival rejected showing the doc, which Samp attributes to pesticide companies sponsoring the event. He won\u2019t name which festival or which company, but a few months later, his film was rejected again from another festival. He later found out the festival was sponsored by the same pesticide companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey didn’t want people learning about me and my anti-pesticide stance, my anti-GM crop stance\u2026it’s a form of censorship,\u201d Samp says. \u201cWhen I started beekeeping many, many years ago, I didn’t realize it’d be so political by now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Samp tries not to focus on things like that, saying that complaining would allow \u201cthem\u201d to win. So that\u2019s what he\u2019s doing. In addition to prepping for touring, dates TBA, Samp says he\u2019s about 90 percent finished with a new album, he has a publishing deal for an \u201calternative beekeeper\u2019s diary,\u201d and is designing a rotating hexagonal sculpture that gives off a magnetic field that creates sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat’s where they’ve got you in the end\u2014if it actually prevents you from doing more work because you’re overthinking about it,\u201d Samp says. \u201cThe best thing I can do to counteract that is just to come up with something new.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can check out Samp\u2019s music on Soundcloud<\/a> or Bandcamp<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies<\/a> [Vice]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Download or stream the audio file here >> The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies Bioni Samp translates bee behaviors and sounds into electronic music to help raise awareness of the ecological issues threatening them. Tinkering with retro synthesizers is nothing new\u2014but beekeeper Bioni Samp isn\u2019t your typical oscillator geek. He records… Read More »The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies (English Listening and Reading Practice)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,20,42,5,22,6,38,4,28,7,43,18,17,41,15,13,14,40,39],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svscreate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}