Among my favourite albums of recent years is Prospects of Skelmersdale by The Magnetic North, an album inspired by a leafy suburban hinterland. Skelmersdale was a new town, ‘part of the vaguely utopian social policies of post-war Britain’. The band featured multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong (The Verve), Orcadian artist and producer Erland Cooper and Northern Irish composer and singer Hannah Peel. The album was heavily influenced by psychogeography, threads of which extended beyond the collective, appearing in subsequent solo projects.
Both Cooper and Peel have been drawn deeper…quite literally – Erland Cooper, following his triptych of Orkney inspired albums, took a more elemental subterranean turn with Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence – a recording has been buried in his childhood home of Orkney – planted to grow and be nurtured or “recomposed” by the earth, before being exhumed and released in three years. While Hannah Peel’s The Unfolding, a collaboration with Bristol’s Paraorchestra, also finds her exploring beneath the ground on a journey that was partly inspired by Robert McFarlane’s Underworld in which the author explored a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future.
For the latest album single video, ‘We Are Part Mineral’, we are introduced to a strikingly innovative elemental world created by Stefan Goodchild (Triple Geek), which uses Barnbrook’s totems from the album artwork as inspiration. In considering our short time on earth, Peel seems to be playing with our very concept of time…something that had me recalling the pitch drop experiment.
Hannah Peel explains, “From collaborating with the Paraorchestra, to the artwork with Jonathan Barnbook which in turn inspired this visual art by the director Stefan Goodchild, the shapes and forms of the original music have taken on new identities. There’s a sense of deep rooted humanity – that our time here on earth is short and we will never fully hear the rocks sing, as they shift over millennia.”
Robert Macfarlane, in response to ‘We Are Part Mineral’ – recently wrote, “Here is the geological human body taking form, with its calcified bones, its teeth-reefs: building itself chemically, determinedly, awesomely, from the sheer matter of the young world. It was mineralisation that allowed us to become upright, generating skeletons that might bear us, muscles that might move us, and as I listened, I found myself unconsciously leaning forwards: moving, moved.”
The Unfolding is described as 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.
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. The collaboration’s roots go back when Paraorchestra’s Artistic Director, Charles Hazlewood, met Peel to ask if she’d consider writing for them. Charles Hazelwood says: “It’s been an amazing journey, collaborating on this album with Hannah. The opportunity to bring together Hannah’s amazing skills as a composer with the extraordinary talents of our Paraorchestra’s musicians, and allow it to evolve gradually and naturally as we navigated the restrictions of the pandemic, means that we have created something incredibly new and organic.”
The eight-track album is set for release on 1 April 2022 via Real World Records – on CD, double vinyl, and double vinyl Dinked Edition: https://smarturl.it/RW241