Feel the buzz: the album recorded by 40,000 bees

He's drummed with Spiritualized and Julian Cope. Now Kev Bales has joined up with Wolfgang Buttress and a beehive - to create a transcendental drone symphony

"We had a joke in the studio that they were the best band members we've ever had," laughs Kev Bales when describing the recording of Be's One album. Bales may have spent the last 30 years drumming with the likes of Spiritualized, Soulsavers and Julian Cope, but the musicians he's referring to here are a different kind of buzz band altogether: to be precise, they're 40,000 bees, and their activity forms the basis of One, a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year's most beguiling offerings.

To understand where it all came from requires a bit of backstory. So let's begin at the Expo 2015 exhibition in Milan, where Nottingham-based artist Wolfgang Buttress has been chosen to represent the UK and build a pavilion under the theme "feeding the planet". He's decided to base his structure around the honeybee - responsible for 30% of the food we eat, yet threatened by pesticides and a lack of biodiversity - and sets to work constructing The Hive, a 50-tonne, 17-metre-high lattice structure for people to wander around. It's an impressive concept, but Buttress feels that, to truly convey the honeybee's plight, it needs something more.