Hannah Peel’s third album, originally released in September 2017, is a seven-movement odyssey composed for analogue synthesizers and traditional 29-piece colliery brass band.

Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia explores one person's journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself.

The brass band and rhythm section – ‘Tubular Brass’ - features the top UK championship brass band players who were recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team. These recordings were then expertly combined with Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production to create a wholly unique, collaborative sound; a first of its kind both live and on record.

The re-issue comes with updated artwork by original designer, Grammy award winning, Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’) and remastered audio on Berry-coloured vinyl.

During her teenage years in Yorkshire, Peel played trombone in brass bands: marching at weekends and wearing ‘dickie bows’ at competitions and so naturally the ‘brass’ sound has become very much a part of her creative DNA. This love has recently come full circle once again, as Peel is the presenter of the series ‘Brass Banding with Hannah Peel’ for BBC Radio 3.

Mary Casio explores two very different worlds – the power of the brass band players combined with the sub-bass impact and air resonating force of the synths but Peel also creates a very human and intimate, at times fragile sounding record through her collection of ‘breathing’ vintage electronics, found sounds, the nuances of the individual brass instruments and the subtle ambience of her voice combining with the real and raw breathing, shuffling and ‘spit’ of the players themselves.

TRACK LISTING

1. Goodbye Earth
2. Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula
3. Deep Space Cluster
4. Andromeda M31
5. Life Is On The Horizon
6. Archid Orange Dwarf
7. The Planet Of Passed Souls 

The Midwich Cuckoos is based on the 1957 science fiction novel by John Wyndham, and tells the story of an English village where the women become mysteriously pregnant. Hannah Peel‘s score is described as a unique and intricately produced soundscape, working in harmony with the sound design of Sky’s adaptation. With analogue synthesisers recreating the horror of the ‘Hive Mind’, tape manipulations, drones, woodwind and melodies echoing the song of the cuckoo bird, Peel creates a score that perfectly balances the organic instrumentations and melodies, juxtaposed with an increasingly dark electronic ‘invasion’. Peel explains, “Creating the score was a constant endeavour to find the balance between darkness and light, fear and beauty. It was a very fine and intricate equilibrium between the normal sunlit logical world as we know it, and a subversive unfamiliar musical language.”

TRACK LISTING

Hive Mind
Cuckoo
Help Me
Ward 300
Hive Scream
Seen
Underground
Midwich School
Midwich Cuckoos
The Blackout
Awakenings
Pregnant
Scared
The Keys
If And When
No Leaving
Waking
A Pattern
Come Out
It's Over

There are pieces of music that seek to tell us deeper stories. Others harness the talents of the players at their disposal in adventurous ways. Then there are the rare, generous works that make us think back to our roots as human beings and to our shared beginnings in the universe, that lift us in their melodies, rhythms and textures, that carry us with them.

The Unfolding is all of these things. An extraordinary eight-part collaboration between composer Hannah Peel (Mercury Prize and Emmy nominee) and Paraorchestra, it was made over three years in precious morsels of time around a global pandemic. These circumstances – unexpected when the collaboration began – add weight to its explorations in sound about who we are, where we came from, and who we could all be. The Unfolding also explores Paraorchestra’s progressive idea of what an orchestra should be, mixing analogue, digital and assistive instruments with a unique ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians to make magic happen, and accessible to all.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Surpassing the meditative shimmer and oscillating beauty of last years' 'Fir Wave' was never going to be easy, but this is the most strikingly beautiful piece of work I think she's ever done. Choral and otherworldly, but imbued with a levity and optimistic glimmer that Peel does so well. Mindblowing.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. The Universe Before Matter [10:58]
A2. Wild Animal [3:55]
Side B
B1. Passage [5:22]
B2. The Unfolding [5:47]
Side C
C1. If After Weeks Of Early Sun [4:16]
C2. Perhaps It Made Us Happy For A Minute [4:17]
C3. We Are Part Mineral [6:06]
Side D
D1. Part Cloud [10:31]
D2. The Unfolding Credits Instrumental Version [02:19] *vinyl Exclusive Not On CD*
D3. The Unfolding Credits [02:19]

The new album, a sonic shimmer of textures and pulses that switches between raw atmospheric edges and environments, arrives with a fascinating history. As Peel explains, “The specialist library label KPM, gave me permission to reinterpret the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop.” This process of re-generation and finding fresh inspiration in pioneering, experimental electronics from the early 1970s is at the core of the album. Peel has made connections and new patterns that mirror the Earth’s ecological cycles through music.

Peel explains, “I’m drawn to the patterns around us and the cycles in life that will keep on evolving and transforming forever. Fir Wave is defined by its continuous environmental changes and there are so many connections to those patterns echoed in electronic music - it’s always an organic dis-covery of old and new.” As Delia Derbyshire revealed in 2000 to BBC sound engineer, journalist and academic Jo Hutton: “I like new things that don’t seem new . . . as though they’ve always been there.”

Known more recently for curating and presenting on BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks, the Northern Irish Emmy-nominated composer and producer’s work is ambitious and forward-looking, adapting and re-inventing new genres and hybrid musical forms. Recent albums include the solo electronic and pop work of Awake But Always Dreaming, which became an ode to her grandmother’s mind as she lived with dementia; the electronic ruralism of Chalk Hill Blue, an album recorded with the poet Will Burns; and the space and the unparalleled vastness of Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, scored for synthesisers and a 30 piece colliery brass band. In 2019 she composed and recorded the soundtrack for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch which earned her an Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary Series Or Special (Original Dramatic Score)’. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: While i'm a big fan of archival synth business, it's often hard to really listen to it in any other situation other than chin-scratching synth-nerdery. I know, i'm a fan of that and while the more esoteric synth explorations are great fun, they have nowhere near the amount of sheer depth and replayability that you get with 'Fir Wave'. A dynamic and cohesive set of rhythmic electronic pieces, moulded with the legendary influence from KPM. Stunning.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Wind Shadow
2 Emergence In Nature
3 Patterned Formation
4 Carbon Cycle

Side B
1 Ecovocative
2 Fir Wave
3 Reaction Diffusion 

Hannah Peel and Will Burns announce details of a new double-A sided single, ‘Pale Tussock’, released via Rivertones. The 7” single features a pair of new pieces from Hannah Peel and Will Burns, combining the same evocative, powerful sonic palette and plainspoken poetry as their acclaimed album ‘Chalk Hill Blue’.

TRACK LISTING

Moth Book
Wendover, Bucks

‘Chalk Hill Blue’ is the first album by poet Will Burns and musician and composer Hannah Peel: a record of electronic ruralism channelling lives threaded through the chalk landscapes of Southern England.

Existing and reacting off each word and sounds in the studio together; with the words of poet Will Burns, the analogue electronic compositions of Hannah Peel and the overarching eye of producer Erland Cooper, all tracks were produced and recorded in their entirety within 12 hours.

The spoken words and sound worlds often seem to emerge from subliminal processes of call and answer; a fertile blurring of collective inspiration and intention circling this abstracted chalk landscape.

This deluxe edition of ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ also includes a 7” single featuring a pair of new pieces from Hannah Peel and Will Burns, combining the same evocative, powerful sonic palette and plainspoken poetry as their acclaimed album.

A commission to create a new collaborative work for the BBC resulted in ‘Moth Book’, an elegiac mediation on loss which flowers into a driving, hypnotic synth workout, perfectly offset by the haunting flipside track, ‘Wendover, Bucks’.

TRACK LISTING

‘Chalk Hill Blue’ LP
Out Of Doors
The Night Life
Afterwards
Spring Dawn On Mad Mile
Change
Chalk Hill Blue
May 9th
Swallowing
Ridgeway
Summer Blues
February

‘Pale Tussock’ 7”
Moth Book
Wendover, Bucks

Along the hills that cradle this village, that throw their shadow on us, that hold themselves above the houses (on a day like today half-wreathed in fog) there is a path. Some people say it is the oldest path there is, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it is an old path. Worn out of the scarp in places, in others cut deliberately to mark the way. The way where, though? One answer is that once, it was the way across the country from East to West, from farm to market. The way of the drover. Another is that now, it is the way across a line of hills that run through what people call the ‘home’ counties. As if there are counties that are not home.

Sometimes these places that rub up against the hills and its path are strangely dull. The towns and villages can look alike, they have been predated on by the high street chains and the supermarkets and they have suffered the decay of pubs and the reluctance of themselves to demand more from the changes that come with time, which is, after all, inevitable and which should, in the end, be progressive. But if we look beyond the intensive farms, the lookalike market towns, the money, the golf courses and the expensive four-wheel drive cars, there is, still, a real place to see. A place with its own tang, as a wise man I know once described it. There are fishermen and builders and window cleaners who get round their drink-driving bans by going to work on a horse and cart.

There are Italian farmers whose legendary boys run the football club, there are old gypsy families that own garden centres, feuding tree surgeons, ex-hedonist-local-playboys who you wouldn’t believe did what they did when they owned a pub just outside of the village where they thought they could get away with anything (and for a while did), tiny cricket clubs where the treasurer ran off with the money and last anyone heard was running a burger van in Northamptonshire. There are still a few good pubs too, where people rub along like they do. More decently than it sometimes feels we’re capable of anymore. All that as well as affairs and heartbreak, death, illness, love. Of course, love.

And beyond the people, there is that other life. Not as much as there should be, no, we must say that. Not enough butterflies, not enough lizards or water voles or fish, certainly not enough birds. But what there is is. And if you take that path out of the village, and up into the hills it is there. It’s broken in many ways, and it’s changed and it’s changing. And we’re causing the changes. But what’s sad about the degradation of our times is that we can still see the potential nature of real places when we come up against them. These old paths, these old stories, these old buildings. We don’t need them for nostalgia, or for some artificial sentimental reverie, we need them to function as engines for our own epochal story-making. That’s what the blandness of a global market economy will put a stop to. The real tang of each person, as well as each place. All deserving of their stories. Here’s some fragments of some I heard along the path.

Will Burns, 2018

Will Burns is Caught by the River poet-in-residence, and Hannah Peel is a frequent fixture of Caught by the River festival stages – both with the ‘cosmic colliery’ electronica of her solo work, and with orchestral place-rock band The Magnetic North (of which Chalk Hill Blue producer Erland Cooper is also a member.)

As part of their collaboration, Burns, Peel and Cooper walked the landscapes around Burns’s Wendover house together: their chalk-heeled boots tracing shared routes through the rhythms and repetitions of the place. What emerges in Chalk Hill Blue is a site-specific-non-specific record of creative place portraiture; an album that traces elements of a living landscape, and reworks them into something that is as sensitive and finely-observed as it is visionary.

TRACK LISTING

1 Out Of Doors
2 The Night Life
3 Afterwards
4 Spring Dawn On Mad Mile
5 Change
6 Chalk Hill Blue
7 May 9th
8 Swallowing
9 Ridgeway
10 Summer Blues
11 February