Tag Archives: Hannah Peel

On Record – Dot Allison: Consciousology (Sonic Cathedral)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

The solo renaissance of Dot Allison continues, the singer – once of the much-loved dance outfit One Dove – releasing her second solo album in two years.

Allison actually began the album back in 2021, as previous opus Heart-Shaped Scars was being released. The song Double Rainbow was the first to be completed, and Consciousology – described by its author as ‘an imagined voice of a conscious universe expressed through music’.

The album has grown to be just that, taking the electrical activity of a plant and translating it into pitch – a ‘botanical session player’, as Allison labels it, to sit alongside the talents of guitarist Andy Bell and the London Contemporary Orchestra, heard in arrangements made by Hannah Peel.

What’s the music like?

Allison’s vocal has a beautiful fragility on the surface, but is supported by an instrument of deceptive strength beneath. Her hushed tones are ideally complemented by string arrangements made once again by Hannah Peel, who shows an instinctive understanding of the balance between the two, so that the words can be clearly heard at all times.

The London Contemporary Orchestra play like a dream, matching Allison’s feathery vocal on the gorgeous Shyness of Crowns, which slides into Unchanged, whose dreamy guitar from Andy Bell gains in strength as it progresses.

Bleached By The Sun features more exquisite word painting, the sighing strings and whispered vocal painting a heat-soaked, drowsy scene, while Moon Flowers is similarly enchanted.

Unchanged has impressive inner strength, while Bleached By The Sun has delicate multitracked vocals, in something of a fever dream, and is complemented by winding string contours. Moon Flowers is an enchanting song, as is Mother Tree – shot through with slightly psychedelic effects on percussion and harp.

Meanwhile inner strength comes to the fore on Double Rainbow, and Weeping Roses forms a pictorial coda in the company of sleepy guitar and piano accompaniment.

Does it all work?

It does, thanks to Allison’s enchanting voice, which harks back to some of the memorable folk-inflected voices of the 1960s and 1970s. The impression remains that she has more power available should she need it, but these songs are beautifully sung as they are.

Is it recommended?

It is. Consciousology will take its listeners to a place far from where they actually are, its dreamy textures and contours providing enchantment and, ultimately, escapism.

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In concert – Hannah Peel: Fir Wave Live premiere

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by Ben Hogwood

How appropriate that Hannah Peel should be placed in Hall One at Kings Place for the live premiere of her 2021 album Fir Wave. The hall is, after all, constructed with the material from a single, 500 year-old German oak tree named Contessa – and here it absorbed music that could have been written in its honour, as part of Peel’s artist residency in the venue’s Sound Unwrapped series.

Fir Wave originated in lockdown, its open air textures providing solace for many – your reviewer included – during several different phases of isolation. Its appeal lies both in the past and the future. Peel based her musical inspiration on the music of Delia Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop, re-sampling and regenerating their work, and absorbing it into her own style and processes. The resultant work is an emotive one, celebrating the environment while fully aware of the issues it faces.

Peel’s deeply felt electronic music is often achieved through a ‘less is more’ approach – as the vocals on first track Wind Shadow demonstrated. With her live accomplice, Hazel Mills, she proceeded to sculpture and layer some beautifully earthy sounds, the melodic motifs coming up from the ground itself but becoming airborne through their expression by voice, synthesizer treble, violin or piano. For Peel is a multitalented artist, her roots nearer to folk music but now fully embracing the electronic idiom.

This included the intricate and sensitively handled beats. These cut through the smokescreen in Hall One with clear precision, drawing back to enable the appreciation of bigger vistas, both in the title track and Emergence In Nature. Peel was an endearing presence, addressing the audience only occasionally as she preferred to let her music do the talking. While understandably nervous at the reaction to music that hadn’t played in public since its release two years ago, the warmth of the reception confirmed she need not have worried. Patterned Formation had an angular beauty to its repeated loop, while Reaction Diffusion packed a heavier punch.

The attentive audience became fully immersed in the music, transported to the natural spaces it was portraying. Fir Wave itself was a treasure, describing a remarkable process found on certain mountains in the world. When the wind hits a mountainside full of trees, it starts to kill off the front arm of the fir trees, allowing the ones at the back to grow. Over years and years, the steady pattern creates a beautiful sound wave across the mountainside that shifts through a long period of time. Peel somehow described this in her music, which left a lasting impression.

With the album ingrained in our thoughts, Peel returned for two charming encores given with the aid of a music box. This gave her the appearance of standing in a cosmic post office, preparing to dispatch a lettercard to a significant other. The music told compelling stories through a charming cover of Cocteau Twins‘ Sugar Hiccup, dating back to 2010, and a revelatory interpretation of New Order’s Blue Monday, turning the music on its head in duet with Mills.

Even these were not the emotional peak of the evening, however, for in a final encore of Unheard Delia Part 1 we heard the voice of Derbyshire herself, caught in an interview in a sunlit room. This detail, imparted by Peel before we heard the music, helped us to capture the moment itself, and the track remained in thrall to a pioneer of electronic music taken too soon. Peel, to her enormous credit, stepped back at this point to ensure Derbyshire’s voice could, at last, be fully heard and appreciated.

Switched On – Hannah Peel: The Midwich Cuckoos (Original Soundtrack) (Invada Records)

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reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

John Wyndham’s classic 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos has inspired a number of big and small screen responses, the most recent being from Sky with their starry interpretation that has been all over digital TV of late. It tells (plot spoiler alert!) of a group of children arriving by stealth in a leafy English town, then growing quickly both physically and mentally as a unit until their power eclipses that of their parents. As the seven-part series takes shape, the tension between the two reaches breaking point, and a number of startling events lead to an extremely fraught battle of the minds.

Reviews for the series, fronted by Keeley Hawes and Samuel West, have been lukewarm, but to this writer at least the story remains a compelling and disturbing one, the tension rarely letting up, with the idea that such dark things could be afoot in ‘normal’ English towns proving to be profoundly unnerving.

The job of portraying these elements in sound has been given to Hannah Peel, who is building up an impressive arsenal of music for the screen, both in analogue and digital form. For her score to The Midwich Cuckoos she uses analogue synthesizers to replicate the ‘hive mind’, shared by the group of children whose initial purpose is to take over the suburbs, but whose greater aims become even more disturbing.

Peel adds drones and tape manipulations to dislocate the perspective of the viewers, but also dips into more obviously English and pastoral references when writing about the setting and the ‘home’ personalities involved.

What’s the music like?

Deeply unnerving but weirdly consoling at the same time – rather like the children who have mysteriously arrived in the town!

Peel’s ability to portray pastoral scenes through her electronics is a massive bonus, for some of the scene setting is exquisite, matching the rich green shades of the production. Yet there is often a dark undercurrent to the writing and a sense of profound unease, especially when describing the hive mind the children have in place. This is done with a single pitch of changing colour and tonal quality, an eerie echo rebounding as though off the walls of a quarry. Lasting comfort is hard to find, though there is brief solace in the mother-child relationships that are formed.

Peel writes descriptively, her melodies portraying the strength of emotion on show from the mothers towards their children, but the deep drones and atmospherics tell a very different story, revealing the layers at work in the youngsters’ minds.

The title music itself is otherworldly, suggesting the intervention of beings from well beyond this planet, and quoting the birdsong of the cuckoo which has at its heart the promise of spring. The Cuckoo music takes the form of the bird as it grows, with the telling lyric “In June, I change my tune”. The Midwich Cuckoos Theme is dark indeed, blotting out the light in a haunting 20 second salvo.

Does it all work?

It does, with the caveat that some of these pieces are short pockets of music written to score specific scenes rather than hang together as part of an album structure. That said, The Midwich Cuckoos makes for compelling if unsettling home listening, which might end with you positioned behind the sofa!

Is it recommended?

Indeed it is – another auspicious addition to Hannah Peel’s discography, revealing a powerfully dark aspect of her writing for the screen.

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As an aside it is worth purchasing the soundtrack on Bandcamp below, as that gives you four bonus tracks.

Switched On – Hannah Peel & Paraorchestra: The Unfolding

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A nudge in the direction of this new release from Mercury-nominated Hannah Peel and Bristol’s Paraorchestra, under their artistic director Charles Hazlewood. The Paraorchestra are an ensemble of professional disabled and non-disabled musicians, and Peel has been working with them for a couple of years.

Their collaboration The Unfolding is a beauty, as a listen to the title track will confirm. Remote voices paint an airy sound picture, with sonorous cello and flickering electronics.


While that piece is more obviously classical, We Are Part Mineral honours its title by bringing a fulsome percussion section to the fore, a nice combination of propulsive rhythms and spacious textures:

The Unfolding is out now on Real World, and comes highly recommended! You can hear more from the album by listening on the Bandcamp link below:

On Record – Dot Allison: Heart-Shaped Scars (SA Recordings)

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dot-allison

reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

The return of Dot Allison is big news indeed. Heart-Shaped Scars is her first album release since 2009, a follow-up of sorts to that year’s Room 7 1/2. Allison secured something of a cult following for her work in the early 1990s with Andrew Weatherall as part of dance band One Dove, before moving onto a solo career with the Afterglow album in 1999. For her new work, however, Allison has more or less pressed pause on the electronic side of things, removing drums too, working with producer Fiona Cruickshank and with several songs orchestrated by Hannah Peel.

It is, she says, a record about ‘love, loss and a universal longing for union that seems to go with the human condition’. Ideal, then, for a generation emerging from more than a year of lockdown conditions.

What’s the music like?

‘Ethereal’ is an over-used word in music reviews, but it is wholly applicable here. Allison’s voice is the principle reason, delivering the words in hushed tones but wholly immersed in the stories she has to tell. Hannah Peel’s orchestrations are another, sensitively complementing the melodies with thoughtful additions of their own, knowing when to hang back so that music keeps its concentrated intimacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=wuWF2tfxBd8&feature=emb_logo

The music often feels sparse and ‘old’ – in the sense that the melodies feel like part of a land with a great deal of history. Long Exposure embodies this approach, while Can You Hear Nature Sing does so with its lyrics, celebrating the natural world as many more of us have done during the pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=fIhACuRtuOY&feature=emb_logo

Lyrically, Allison paints vivid pictures and emotions. One Love – which would surely have been a dance anthem with that title 30 years ago – is now a vulnerable soul at the start of a relationship, two cellos dovetailing as Allison tells the story. The Haunted draws the ear closer. ‘Step inside this haunted house’, sings Allison in lower tones at the start, the melody resembling a slower folk tune while the string harmonics shimmer in the middle ground.

Constellations tells of a wide-open freedom, the author lying ‘still in the lake, floating on my back, gazing up at all the stars’ – painted by a twinkling piano figure and shimmering strings. While this has a certain reassuring quality, Forever’s Not Much Time is truly haunting. ‘I miss you, like a dead man recalls life’, sings Allison, as a shiver passes over the face of the music. Cue The Tears has a similar chill. ‘Did we shut out the sun?’, asks the chorus.

Does it all work?

It does. Some of the songs are longer structures, and most are slow in their movement, but Allison makes them work, the music drawn out exquisitely with sensitive orchestration and backing vocals. Listening conditions will make a big difference to your enjoyment of the album, though – with a quiet room or headphones advised for maximum impact.

Is it recommended?

Wholly. If you have Dot Allison’s body of work already, then this will mark the start of a new chapter in the story of her music. If you are new to her sound, then it is a great place to start, a place of storytelling through simple and directly effective means – just like the best folk music.

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