FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Sixty: Hannah Peel
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WHAT better time…
to celebrate a hugely influential and important woman in music than just after her latest album has been nominated for the Mercury Prize! You can read more about it here. Fir Wave is the latest album from Hannah Peel. The Irish artist, music producer, Emmy-nominated composer and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster is one of the most impressive and distinct musicians in the world. Peel released Fir Wave on her own label, My Own Pleasure Records. I am going to come to that album. I will bring in a couple of reviews. Before I come to some reviews, there are a couple of interviews that are worth bringing together. When The Guardian spotlighted Peel earlier in the year, we get to know how she started out and what she has accomplished in her career so far:
“Paul McCartney knew Hannah Peel’s talent before the world did. He hands out pin-badges at every degree ceremony at Liverpool’s Institute for Performing Arts, which he co-founded, and where Peel studied music. In 2007, her graduation year, she’d been chosen to compose something to accompany each student walking on stage.
Peel had been advised to do a fanfare of trumpets, but refused; she wrote a minimalist miniature for vibraphone and marimba instead. “My principal hated it,” she says, laughing down the Zoom line. “But when I crossed the stage and shook Paul McCartney’s hand, he whispered in my ear, ‘I really like your music. Well done!’”
Fast-forward 14 years and Peel has built an intricate and impressive career. Her name is probably most recognisable as one of the presenters of Radio 3’s late-evening show Night Tracks, on weeknights. The show caused controversy when it launched in September 2019, replacing three broadcasts of the station’s beloved experimental programme, Late Junction. Though Night Tracks contains more classical music, Peel preserves the spirit of Late Junction, with thrilling juxtapositions of artists. One night, you get Rachmaninov followed by Texan multimedia artist Akira Rabelais, the next, it’ll be Benjamin Britten alongside Brazilian experimentalist Vic Bang.
Peel is also one of our most exciting crossover composers. Her brilliant new album, Fir Wave – finished over lockdown – explores and develops sounds from a recording by BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. Her musicbox-heavy score for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, got an Emmy nomination last summer, while her eerie soundtrack for TV thriller The Deceived won critical acclaim. She’s Paul Weller’s orchestral arranger (she’s been working on his forthcoming LP: “he’s just fab”), and collaborated on a micro-opera about dating in lockdown, Close, with librettist Stella Feehily.
She’s also recently been elected to the board of the Ivors Academy, the largest campaigning association for professional musicians in Europe, and is particularly vocal about the place for women in music. “All the TV and film jobs I’ve done have been directed by women,” she says, talking from her writing room at home in Bangor, Northern Ireland (she bought a five-bedroom house here in 2018 for the price of a tiny one-bed in London). “It feels like the women getting into power are going, ‘Right, I’m going to employ another female composer’, but we have to remind ourselves the number of female composers [in film] is something ridiculous. It’s gone down this year from 6% to 4%. We need to know why.
Peel was born in Craigavon, Northern Ireland, in 1985. The Troubles had a big effect on her family: her mum’s from Enniskillen, she explains, where the Remembrance Sunday bomb exploded in 1987, killing 11 people. “We arrived in Enniskillen the day after and I remember seeing our car on the TV news, going round the roundabout.” On her sixth birthday she was airlifted from a Belfast street when another bomb went off; people in the police in her family lost limbs. “I grew up with this sense of transition all the time and awareness that things are never stable. All that history that stays with you.”
When she was eight, her family moved to Barnsley, South Yorkshire, with her father’s work in food manufacturing (that is where Peel acquired her lilting Yorkshire accent). The area was still suffering from the loss of coal mining, but free brass instruments were being given out in schools, and Peel began learning the cornet and trombone. “There was a real sense that you had to get your kids involved in the music from the place they were from, otherwise there’s no kind of hope. Then there came this beautiful time later in the 1990s, where lottery money was helping young people play and learn and go on tours.” A lot of that infrastructure has now gone, she says”.
Hannah Peel has had such a busy and eclectic career! I love the inspiration behind Fir Wave. I love all of Peel’s albums – especially 2017’s Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia -, though Fir Waves seems to be this new peak. It is no wonder it has been given a Mercury Prize nod! The circumstances behind Fir Wave’s recording is different to her other albums – I guess, in so small part, because of the pandemic. In this interview with The Quietus, she discussed hesitation before making the album; the restlessness of Fir Waves may have stemmed from those doubts and fears:
“It perhaps speaks to the nature of the times that Hannah Peel’s newest album had a somewhat different gestation to much of the work that has made up the many highs of her pleasingly non-conformist career. Film scores, super-groups, brass bands, working with bona fide musical national treasures – even the potential disaster of picking up with yours truly for our Chalkhill Blue collaboration. But Fir Wave comes out of a more singular enterprise, starting life as a project based on the re-interpretation of the library music label KPM’s 1972 album KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, which featured one of Peel’s heroes in Delia Derbyshire.
“At first I was reluctant to do it,” Hannah told me from her home in Northern Ireland. “There was so much going on and I just wasn’t sure about making a record with no audience. But then I thought about the idea of re-working and referring to Delia Derbyshire and Electrosonic and I thought actually it could be really cool, so I went with it… So there was this interesting process, a kind of preciousness, because I didn’t mean it to be an album, for it to be listened to like that. It’s supposed to be licensed, like library music. But when I finished it, they said they loved it and that if I wanted to release it, they would happily help organise it.”
"In the last year or so, I felt like I listened to so much music, especially in this field, that had this quality of stillness, a kind of quiet, a sense of the present moment, and I just started thinking about what I would want to hear when we come out of all this. I started to think about colour, and shape. I wanted to write something that had energy, that you could dance to. Something that replicated the energy of the culture that emerged after the two world wars.”
That restless energy is there in every synth line and drum loop across Fir Wave, as it has become ingrained through the music that makes up Hannah’s whole career – a career built on boundless imaginative instinct married to a supreme technical gift which has created a back catalogue that seems immune to standing still. Her Baker’s Dozen selection reveals just that instinct, and more besides of a fascinating artist and her influences. It reads to me like a document worthy of someone dedicated to resisting boundaries – half applied, practical text, the bricks and mortar of influence, of discovery, of learning – half personal reminiscence. Wonder and wave form. Science and magic. Memory and metronome”.
I know that Hannah Peel is going to inspire a lot of people around the world. She already does. Her work gets better and more amazing with each release. Fir Wave has won huge acclaim. This is what Loud and Quiet wrote in their review:
“Listen to enough of Hannah Peel and it won’t take long for ripples of Delia Derbyshire to interfere with the transmission. Familiar to many for her charmed folk in The Magnetic North, her more recent solo ventures are recognised for their electronic currents, reinterpreting genre and pairing unlikely musical forms.
Like Derbyshire, whose residency inside the BBC’s hallowed Radiophonic Workshop helped pioneer an influential blueprint for British electronic music, Peel’s appetite for unearthly, space-age frequencies has long been subject to comparison. A courageous, classically trained multi-instrumentalist and composer, Peel’s acclaimed 2017 album Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia launched a colliery brass band into orbit and piloted an analogue-inspired space odyssey resembling of Derbyshire’s own passage through the cosmos.
Now with feet firmly back on the ground, it seems fitting that her new album continues to fantasize over both her and Derbyshire’s shared sensibilities, for the first-time paying homage to the late composer and the immortal gravity of her work. Courtesy of KPM’s specialist library of archival music, Fir Wave recycles a fascinating history of electronic music by repurposing retired sounds into cutting-edge new models.
Drawn to the circular pattern of Earth’s ecological cycles, by generating and resampling her own digital instruments, Peel injects new life into the experimental sounds of the early 1970s. As tectonic shivers pulsate and shift between Fir Wave’s transforming environments, fragments extracted from Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop are barely recognisable behind Peel’s fantasia production style. More powerful than lyrics, each track communicates its own panorama. Rolling landscapes spill uncontrollably from ‘Patterned Formation’ and the aptly-titled ‘Ecovocative’, with each sprawling terrain trailing beyond the horizons of human comprehension. Standalone single ‘Emergence In Nature’ dips into Jon Hopkins’ skittering and off-kilter electronica; it’s a rare moment of clarity for an album that, at times, sounds as unfathomable as life itself”.
Just before wrapping up, I am keen to draw from the CLASH review of Fir Wave. They were immersed and impressed by one of the finest albums of this year (Fir Wave was released in March):
“There’s so much to unpack in Hannah Peel’s work, that pulling upon one thread can lead to entire worlds falling out of her sonic cupboard. New album ‘Fir Wave’ is a case in point – dipping into the past (the work of Delia Derbyshire and library crucible KPM are honoured), there’s also a carefree wandering into the future, a sense of grappling with the unknown.
Cross-referencing everything from the Earth’s ecological cycles to Japanese art, this array of detail shouldn’t distract from the sheer sonic beauty Hannah Peel conjures on her new album. ‘Wind Shadow’ is a synth balm, while the more propulsive, techno-edged ‘Emergence In Nature’ retains its organic sheen amid its percussive pirouettes.
‘Patterned Formation’ dips into early 70s synth incarnations, recalling at times Brian Eno’s early solo work. ‘Carbon Cycle’ meanwhile finds Hannah Peel relishing in fragmented elements of degraded sound, applying an orchestral swoop to her arcane digitalism.
A record that feels exquisitely unified, ‘Fir Wave’ is a tightly bound song cycle. Each mood is distinct, but Hannah Peel is able to let them overlap, resulting in rich and evocative elements of nuance. The pun-tastic ‘Ecovocative’ for example radiates in a beatific glow, something that contrast with the sparsity which opens the adjacent title track; nothing is permanent in her world, but equally nothing is ever truly discarded.
Ending with the gossamer undulations of synthetic sound that ripple through ‘Reaction Diffusion’, we’re put in mind of those early Kraftwerk experiments, or even Harmonia’s recordings. A piece in which contrary states are allowed to communicate, the pulsating bedrock of ‘Reaction Diffusion’ underpins hazy layers of sound that glow with a metallic sheen. It’s beautiful and immersive, but also foreboding; a piece whose majesty is attached to no small degree of mystery.
Having won international acclaim for her work on Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch documentary, Hannah Peel has responded by moving inwards, by finessing and doubling down on the instincts that drive her. ‘Fir Wave’ is a subtle triumph, a record whose innate beauty dissipates to reveal complex aesthetic machinery, while never fully revealing its secrets”.
I have ended this feature with a playlist featuring some of Peel’s best work. She is an incredible artist, composer and all-round talent. There is no telling how far she can go and what she can achieve. One of the most inspiring people in music, she is a definite innovator and pioneer. The music world is very fortunate to have her…
IN their midst.