Hannah Peel brings a performance of her Mercury Music Prize shortlisted album, Fir Wave live to the NCH as part of the Perspectives series.The album, a sonic shimmer of textures and pulses that switches between raw atmospheric edges and environments, arrived in 2021 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.”

Her process of re-sampling and generating her own new digital instruments, allowed for fresh inspiration in pioneering, experimental electronics from the early 1970s is at the core of the album. On Fir Wave, Peel made connections and new patterns that mirror the Earth’s ecological cycles through music. Or as Elizabeth Alker (Unclassified BBC Radio 3) puts it: “The sound of nature’s internally evolving patterns and cycles, green shoots and roots wrapping themselves around vintage analogue effects and made to sound like a 21st Century arboretum rave”
Peel has worked on this new electronic set - which debuted at Kings Place in London back in February - with mixer / engineer TJ Allen (Bat For Lashes, Portishead and Anna Calvi) who also collaborated with her on the Fir Wave album’s more beat-driven tracks ‘Emergence In Nature’ and ‘Ecovocative’.
Hannah Peel is a Northern Irish artist, composer, producer and broadcaster. Her solo record career includes the shortlisted 2021 Mercury Music Prize electronic album, Fir Wave; 2016's Awake But Always Dreaming, which became an ode to her grandmother’s mind as she lived with dementia; and the space-themed Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, scored for synthesisers and a 30 piece colliery brass band.

Presented by NCH