Recently my family and I watched a Documentary called Vanishing of the Bees. The main story of this Doc. is how the bees are mysteriously vanishing across America. The reason this is a problem is that Bees pollinate plants and fruits. If there are no more bees to pollinate, then fruit crops will not survive unless they are artificially pollinated or imported in from other countries. I personally have a problem with artificially doing things that God has designed nature to accomplish and feel that on a large part that is what has gotten us into this mess. The fascinating part of the vanishing is that the bees just disappeared by the thousands. They would have bee hives that would be fully populated one day and the next day thousands of bees would be gone. There were no dead bodies left behind just empty bee hives. One of the theories to why the bees are disappearing is due to all the pesticides that they are spraying on everything that grows. These pesticides were developed by the some of the same companies that developed chemical warfare back during the world wars. They took the same chemicals they were using to kill people and tweaked them to kill insects and weeds and such. In the shortsightedness of our Government these products were never fully tested. If you follow the EPA and how they work you will know that they do not test products themselves they regulate products. The companies that develop these products are responsible to provide testing for them so you have a situation where the very companies who stand to benefit the most from the success of the product are responsible to validate there safety. That is like a teacher telling her class that they are responsible for grading there final exams. No one would ever fail. So now we are in a situation that years later we are seeing negative repercussions to products that we have been assured were safe. Of course no one on the political end of things want to dig too deeply into these issues because the huge corporations that developed these toxic products are pouring millions of dollars in lobbying to our stumbling government. Oh yea and the people running these Government protection agencies were all formal employees of the offending companies. It sounds like the plot to a conspiracy movie only it is all true. The bees are not the only ones that fall prey to it. It is the same for the organic food movement. Look up Monsanto and what they are doing to our farmers in the name of justice. It is actually sad and scary at the same time.

So the bees are basically drunk on all the chemicals that we spray everywhere and eventually they just run away or fly away if you will. Of course when you approach the companies that make millions of dollars off of selling these chemicals they tell you you are being ridiculous and fanatical. And of course their lawyers have a lot more at stake then yours.

So what’s a recording engineer and musician have to do with this? Well here it is. I got to thinking about how we look at music and production these days it seems that our tendency is to want everything faster cheaper and more disposable then it was yesterday. I’m not going that way anymore. It takes some time to make art that will be timeless and relevant and I am going to do my best to invest time in honing my craft so I can best serve my clients and musical allies. You can not make the same kind of records in your basement that you could make in my studio. I realize this is a bold statement but it is true. I have over 20 years of experience in getting good sounds and solving problems that come up. I also have the space to create where you are not waiting for the neighbors or your mom to tell you to turn it down. Now understand I am not saying that if you spent more time and money on your project that it will always be better. There is much art and science and even more mystery in creating music that will endure. Don’t sell yourself short on what could be just because you want to save money.

So you might just see more of the bee here at Forgotten Genre Productions it’s a symbol that helps me remember.