Bee Reiki gestated within the regular lockdown zoom meetings Steve and Paul were holding in 2020 and 2021. Steve being based in London and Paul just outside Brighton, in these online meetings, like many musicians at that time, they mostly chatted and caught up with news and analysed the lack of live performance opportunities created by the pandemic.

In the odd fifteen minutes or so they weren’t doing that, they attempted to improvise together using the Zoom platform. Steve would balance his iPad inside his grand piano in his front room, while Paul - invariably using an electronic set up of some kind - would experiment with direct audio recording or sometimes hi-fi speakers pointed at his laptop. Often the Zoom platform exposed its limitations for processing audio reliably, sometimes distorting one or both person’s audio feed, adding sonic artefacts, glitches, drop-outs and so forth. Because of this unpredictable behaviour, Steve and Paul began to think of Zoom as a kind of third contributory participant to their sessions. Not exactly an unwelcome guest, but…

So when restrictions were finally lifted and we could all return to whatever “normal” had become after the pandemic, it made sense to invite a real-life third participant to join in. Faradena Afifi was their first choice; known for setting up Noisy Women. Wanting to sustain a freshness and sense of new found freedom, a studio recording day was booked quickly and without prior rehearsal, the tracks that make up Bee Reiki were recorded by Syd Kemp in his East London studio in one day.