Ant-Bee

Ant-Bee is the project of Billy James, who grew up in North Carolina, played drums in local bands in 1973, studied at the prestigious Berklee College of Music from 1979 to 1982, became a hippie in Los Angeles in April 1983, and soon collaborated with Frank Zappa and Steve Vai.

Ant-Bee earned the title of Zappa’s artistic heir with Pure Electric Honey (Voxx, 1990 – Divine, 1999), a sort of sui generis work featuring outcasts from the Mothers and the Magic Band (ten in total, including bagpipes, sitar, and violin). Ant-Bee’s music continues the psychedelic tradition with a more conscious and pronounced electronic manipulation. Some tracks, to the extremes of Black & White Cat, are built by filtering and blending natural sounds with instrument sounds in a technique akin to avant-garde composition, letting fragments of unintelligible and barely audible vocals float in the mix at an excruciatingly slow, languid pace. In the electronic mix, a sound (voice, instrument, noise) may appear for a moment only to be immediately swallowed by the global hiss. The song thus becomes a dust of sound events stripped of identity, drowned in the chaotic flow of the cosmos, an intermittent stream of glimmers of clarity. Eating Chocolate Cake foregrounds vocals, stretched, slowed, and layered, sweet to the point of nausea, humble enough to verge on Gregorian chant. My Cat instead emphasizes dynamics: it begins as a piece of symphonic intensity (timpani, pipe organ, sampled noises) but ends in a jam of guitar distortions at a dizzying pace. Silly Fat Fingers is one of the most substantial tracks, almost like a raga. The work culminates in Evolution #7, a symphony within a symphony, whose first movement is a psychedelic little tune (the most musical track on the album) worthy of the Creation or early Pink Floyd. Between cerebral flourishes, on the edge of silence and chance, and ecstatic “om”s, a cauldron of retro citations emerges. Rarely have the dizzying effects of drugs been rendered so faithfully in music.

James then indulged in the satisfaction of reassembling the original Mothers Of Invention lineup. With My Favorite Mothers and Other Bizarre Muzik (Electric Yak, 1992) is a more serious work, opening with the playful Lunar Egg-Clips Runs Amuck and culminating in the Live Jam dominated by saxophone, synthesizer, and guitar, but also ranging from noisy interludes à la Ummagumma (Who Slew the Beast) to the baroque pop of The Girl With The Stars In Her Hair and In A Star, powered by the grand contributions of Bunk Gardner, Don Preston, and Jimmy Carl Black. Brian Wilson, more than Zappa, is James’s muse, followed closely by early Pink Floyd. The project is confused and irrational, a stylistic exercise unto itself.

The CD edition is titled With My Favorite Vegetables and Other Bizarre Muzik (Divine, 1994) and substitutes one track.

James’s output may seem sparse, but in reality, besides Favorite, he recorded a couple of tapes a year: Rarities I (Electric Yak, 1991), The Worst of (Electric Yak, 1991), Son of Lunar Eggclips Dances with the Mystic Mother (Acid Tapes, 1992), Evolution (Acid Tapes, 1993), The @x!#*% of (Electric Yak, 1993), plus the 7" EP The Bizarre (Lollipop Shop, 1994).

However, his lack of commercial success led him to focus mainly on his writing career (he has authored several biographies). He later released Mynd Muzik (Electric Yak, 1997).

Lunar Muzik (Divine, 1997) is an even crazier carnival than the first album. Billy James gathered veterans from the Mothers Of Invention (from the previous album), Gong (including Daevid Allen himself), Alice Cooper, and Hawkwind (Harvey Bainbridge). The album has no plot, rambling without restraint, moving from Gong-style science fiction (Diva Gliss) to bubblegum pop (Love Is Only Sleeping), from easy-listening satire (Silicone Hump) to Hawkwind-style space-rock (By And By I Touch The Sky), culminating in the suite-collage Snorks And Wheezes, worthy of Absolutely Free. James has the gift of drawing out the best of what his guests were capable of during their golden years.

Electronic Church Muzik (2010), ten years in the making, featured Jan Akkerman of Focus, Peter Banks of Yes, Peter Frohmader, Zoot Horn Rollo of Captain Beefheart, Bunk Gardner and Don Preston Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention, Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth of Gong, etc.
First and foremost comes the ever stronger Gong influence. Smyth's wailing vocals are used to great effect in Birth, the brief overture for heartbeat and wind, Daevid Allen, on the other hand, raps The Language of the Body accompanied by Don Preston's synthesizer, Bunk Gardner's free-jazz horns and Ant-Bee's eerie musique concrete. The Zappa influence is much less prominent: Eye of Agomoto (featuring the historical line-up of Preston, Gardner, Jimmy Carl Black and Ant-Bee) is a joyous jazzy orchestral nonsense reminiscent of Zappa's Uncle Meat, but that's the only remnant of the Zappa civilization.
The album takes detours in all directions: Mallard flies Towards Heaven is a dobro-driven (Zoot Horn Rollo) blues instrumental for jug-band; Flutter-bye Butter-fllye is a languid psychedelic shuffle with Caribbean overtones; Endless Journey is an oneiric ambient vignette with humpback whale on vocals (and Peter Banks on guitar); Frohmader leads the gothic electronic vision of Hallelujah replete with monastery choir; Don't You Ever Learn? could be a ballad from an early Todd Rundgren album; etc. Add Ant-Bee's brief musique-concrete excursions (notably the two parts of The Wrath), that dot the album like mirages dot a desert. Ant-Bee even covers Alice Cooper's psychedelic ditty Living (1969). Some of the pieces are redundant, but just the breath of imagination makes this an unmistakable Ant-Bee album.