FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Hannah Peel – Fir Wave
_________
WITHOUT doubt…
PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Marley
one of 2021’s finest and most immersive albums, Hannah Peel’s Fir Waves is one that everyone should revisit. Peel played the album in full earlier in the year. It will tour the U.K. and Ireland later this month. Such an amazing album, I would love to hear more of the tracks played across radio stations. The spectacular Craigavon-born artist, producer and composer is one of our finest talents (someone who has been appearing at some big festivals this year). Among the most remarkable and consistently brilliant composers of her generation, Fir Wave arrived a decade after her debut album, The Broken Wave. Quite a musical journey we have seen from Peel. Fir Wave boasts and augments some of Hannah Peel’s finest production too. I raved about her 2022 soundtrack for the T.V. series, The Midwich Cuckoos. This incredible score was nominated for both the Ivor Novello Award and Music Producer's Guild Award. Fir Wave was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2021 – and was one that deserved to win -, in the process winning a slew of magnificent reviews. Because Hannah Peel is such a prolific, interesting and inspiring composer and producer, I wanted to spend some time with the astonishing Fir Wave. I will, as I tend to with these features, end with some positive reviews – ample proof and ammunition for you checking out Fir Wave! I have a lot to cover off through interviews and reviews. Before that, and if you are new to the wonder of Fir Wave and the awe-inspiring Hannah Peel, Rough Trade provide some more details:
“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 discovery 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”.
I am going to continue with an interview from Bandcamp. Hannah Peel discussed her respect and admiration of the music of synth pioneer, Delia Derbyshire. An innovator and pioneer that has influenced so many composers and artists, Fir Wave is an album that you would definitely see Delia Derbyshire giving her seal of approval to:
“The music of synth pioneer Delia Derbyshire has always been present in Hannah Peel’s life. As a child, she watched Doctor Who and was amazed by “all those noises,” but it wasn’t until she was in her mid-20s that she began to look into Derbyshire’s work more closely. Ten years later, she’s been given the opportunity to rework the sounds of Derbyshire’s 1972 work KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, an album of electronic library sounds for film and TV crafted in the BBC’s now-renowned Radiophonic Workshop.
The result is Fir Wave, an album that moves in circles between techno rhythms and contemplative ambience with richly layered synths. Fir Wave was originally intended as a library record, and it took Peel a while to get over her reverence of the source material. “You’re normally making music because it’s come from you, so the energy is sometimes missing because you don’t know what you’re saying,” she says. “With this, the energy was held in because I was just too afraid to approach it. I wanted to honor the sounds but also take it to a futuristic place. It’s not the type of album that you can remix and remake.”
Her admiration for the Electrosonic producers (Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, and Don Harper) is palpable; when describing how they made their otherworldly sounds acoustically, she reaches to flick a metal lampshade with her finger: “Stuff like that! It’s a really magical technique, it feels quite precious.” These organic sounds are still present throughout Fir Wave, though filtered through Peel’s sensibilities, from the crinkly tape loops that open up “Wind Shadow” and the floating, pulsing ambience of “Carbon Cycle,” to the gentle transition between tightly ascending guitar motifs and a two-note bassline on “Reaction Diffusion.”
While creating the album, Peel discovered some unexpected parallels between Derbyshire’s life and her own. “I read about her growing up in Coventry and hearing WWII bombs and air raids, and those sounds played a massive part in her life. I grew up in Northern Ireland, and there was a bomb on my sixth birthday down the street. There were always police and people around. You get used to sirens going off and being in a troubled state of mind, and I definitely think the sounds of that have stayed with me as they did for her,” Peel says. Finding similarities between herself and her icon allowed her a way into crafting the album. She did this by rendering the original sounds as samples so that she could create her own instruments from them and play around with them more easily: “Then it felt like I was regenerating something new from old.”
Though she made the album two years ago, lockdown gave her the opportunity to reflect on her compositions: “I had a chance to actually sit with it and look at it as an album, and not dismiss it,” she says. Having been releasing music under the radar for nearly a decade, Peel feels an affinity with the early women synth pioneers who operated outside of mainstream recognition for most of their lives. “There’s that strong independence that these women had, formed by having no other choice but to work around the industry,” she says. “They made their music, and when the industry wasn’t working for them, they had to leave and set up their own thing, even if they weren’t getting recognition. That beautiful, gorgeous spirit of keeping going and keeping to your own true self is really inspiring,” she says.
Peel has never released on a major record label and before her first release in 2010 was working as a session musician. Starting out as a singer-songwriter, she has since gravitated towards making instrumental music. “I really miss singing. Maybe I’ll go back to it, but creatively right now, there’s just too much to talk about and it feels like it’s too much to put words onto,” she says. This often conflicts with her soundtrack work—she’s previously composed for the documentary film Game of Thrones: The Last Watch which earned her an Emmy nomination, and she has work coming up on a new Netflix documentary. “You really have to switch your head, like the left and right sides of your brain. But I love both sides, and I don’t think I could do just one or the other,” she says”.
I am going to come onto an amazing interview with Music Radar. I have sourced quite a lot of this interview, as Hannah Peel is so compelling to hear (or read in this case) when she discusses music, her processes and influences. I have been a fan of hers for years, though I feel Fir Wave might be her best work to date. Someone who gets stronger and more astonishing with every work she releases:
“From the otherworldy voices of opener Wind Shadow, through the hypnotic beats and synths of Emergence In Nature all the way through to the ethereal splendour of album closer, Reaction Diffusion, Peel has crafted a spell-binding electronic gem.
Given access to use original recordings from BBC Radiophonic Workshop legend Delia Derbyshire as DNA for the project, Fir Wave, allowed Peel to respectfully re-interpret the source-material, building digital instruments from it to then launch it into bristling electronic realms Derbyshire would be proud of.
Fir Wave is a high watermark in Hannah Peel’s already impressive musical CV, which includes an Emmy nomination for her soundtrack to Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, along with musical collaborations with artists including John Foxx, Paul Weller, Erland Cooper and Simon Tong (as The Magnetic North).
Fir Wave exists in a space where electronic music of the past, present and future collides perfectly. Little wonder we was so excited to catch up with Hannah and find out more about Delia, DAWs and discovering more tactile ways of sculpting sound.
Fir Wave seems to be getting universally excellent reviews. That must be pleasing?
“I’m so blown away, actually because sometimes you make a record that you work so intensely on and my records usually have so many moving parts with, like, 30 brass players or the like. This one was just so simple, and it was just nice to be able to make the record and put it out as it’s self-released. Yeah, the fact that people are picking it up and talking about it is just beautiful.”
It’s quite something to be given free access to Delia Derbyshire’s catalogue. Did you have the project in mind and then ask for the archives?
“EMI Productions, which own the rights now, just came to me and asked if I was interested in making a library record for them: ‘here’s your starting point!’. I guess because I’d never done a library before that, I did have some reservations. But they quickly dissipate when you take out the feeling of having to do something that you’ve never done before - and that you’ll be using material that’s very precious to a lot of people.
"So yeah, I mean, once I kind of decided how I was going to do it, it became very easy. But yeah, there was a lot of trepidation about it to begin with.”
What a treat to be allowed to immerse yourself in that source material for a while...
“I know. I think about it and go ‘my God, that’s insane.’ Some of it wasn’t ever intended for an audience or to be released. And in some ways that’s better, because then I don’t have the pressure of putting this out and people expecting massive things with it because of it being Delia Derbyshire.
"I had time to live with the main body of it for the last two and a half years. And then I revisited it and mixed it all again last year so I got a bit more perspective on it and it felt like it was the right time to do it.”
The album has got a strange, lockdown quality to it, very hypnotic. How did you approach what bits of Delia’s you would work with?
“I mean, if you’ve heard the original record then it’s pretty bonkers so it’s hard to configure how to assess what bits to work with. I didn’t get the stems so I just had the audio as it was released, so I just chose tiny fragments of things that I thought really resonated with me. Like, there were these kind of bubbling synth sounds.
"When I decided that I was going to make my own instruments from those sounds in Kontakt to use with a MIDI keyboard, you know, choosing the right kind of texture, or sound was important because you can’t necessarily use all of them as a chord or anything like that.
"That was important so I chose specific ones, maybe like five or six, that I made instruments out of that were like ‘Delia Fire’ and ‘Delia Earth’. Then the rest were ones that couldn’t be taken out of context and replayed; ones that needed to be as they are on the record.
I love the more organic sounds where you don’t quite know what they are or where they’re from… almost like part of your psychology.
"So yeah, choosing them was quite hard because sometimes they do overlap in the original records so I had to be pretty specific but that can also be the fun part.”
Is curation of sounds becoming an important skill for electronic musicians to have?
“It’s not just about you handling the machines. It’s about curating and treating them like they’re part of an orchestra. They are part of a fabric in life, almost.
"You know, I love the more organic sounds where you don’t quite know what they are or where they’re from… almost like part of your psychology.”
There’s a real sense of respect to the original music that emanates from Fir Wave… very much not a result of banging out a few presets!
“You’ve got to be though, haven’t you? And that’s really good to hear because I didn’t want to be disrespectful at all.
"You know, I love modular stuff and analogue sounds… it’s just kind of woven into my being, I guess, from a young age, and the folk singing with my dad and stuff like that has definitely got an organic feel to it.
" One of the important things that I found was the ethos of the original record. It has industrial, scientific, almost futuristic element to it. When I was looking at the track titles there’s also a celestial element that’s very beautiful.
"So when I was thinking about what I wanted this one to be, it was very much about how we are right now. I didn’t want it to be like an eco warrior record at all, it just felt, with lockdown and everything, that I really needed to refocus and think about nature, and the sounds that play within nature. Like the inside of a tree and how that sounds like a synthesizer.”
So, was Kontakt your main weapon of choice for transforming all your collated source material into something more musical?
“Yeah, that was the easiest way to do it. It’s only been the last few years that I’ve really got into Kontakt because of making my own sounds and using that in various scores.
"The Deceived score that I did used sounds from my house inside of the score so I sampled crystal cut-glass, doors and crazy bells that they have in the house and made those into soundscapes to be part of the underbelly of the TV show.
"So, I’ve used it for a while but it’s only in the last few years I’ve found the beauty in it rather than it just being another instrument. ”
It’s a very powerful sound-sculpting tool…
“Yes and it just makes it unique to you and makes it fun. Sometimes when you write music so much, you need something to keep you a bit more interested and keep you excited. There’s something really nice about sampling something and then transforming it into music.”
Having followed your work over the past few years, it strikes us that you’re someone who enjoys finding the ghosts in the machines. Is that a conscious thing you do?
“Completely. My first proper experiences of synths were with Benge because I shared a studio with him and also played with John Foxx. His collection of synths when he was based in London was amazing but, you know, lots of them didn’t quite work, so my early experiences were of having to manipulate the ones that weren’t working properly and create something out of it.
“So, it was always about the things that had gone wrong, or were a little wonky and, like you said, the ghosts in them. One of the first synths that I bought was a Juno-60, which, when you turned it on had this ghostly choir sound without even hitting any of the presets… just constantly pulsing. So yeah, I guess I’ve always come from that angle of like, the nuances and the kind of secret side of it. All totally fuelled by Benge!”
You could certainly do a lot worse than having Benge, John Foxx and Stephen Mallinder as your guides!
“He’s unreal! I think I used that studio time really well but I still don’t feel I used Benge’s time quite as well. Like, I just wish I had said, ‘can you teach me this, this and this and this’.
"Way back, when I was first talking about releasing records, I wanted to just set up my own little label and do it that way and Mal was like, 'why?' I said, 'I don’t know other than for my own pleasure', which is the reason My Own Pleasure then became the name of the label. So, they’ve definitely been an influence.”
To have access to such an amazing collection of synths and hardware blows the mind but there is also a slight (albeit nice) dilemma that when you have no restrictions, what do you use?
“I do really miss having the freedom to use all those machines. Occasionally I’d sneak in and borrow something to experiment with then put it back for the morning [laughs]. Benge knew I was doing it but he didn’t mind.”
Did you have any favourite bits and pieces from your time at Benge’s?
“God, there are so many. This is random and probably not very productive but the Simmons Clap Trap, which I thought was incredible. He has loads and loads of drum machines and I really loved the TR-808, which was always fun to use. He has an original LinnDrum. I liked the Korg MonoPoly synth as well as the Solina String Ensemble machine. I think probably the 808 was my favourite though as it was the first drum machine I took to”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pål Hansen for The Observer
Let’s move onto a couple of the many glowing reviews for the 2021 gem that is Fir Wave. Award-nominated and hugely successful, I do think that this sublime album needs to get more exposure and airplay today. Loud and Quiet awarded Fir Wave 8/10. I have revisited Fir Wave recently and it remains this spellbinding and thoroughly fascinating work that I discover new layers from a couple of years after its release:
“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”.
CLASH also gave Fir Wave a decent and massively respectful 8/10 for Fir Wave. I think that everyone needs to listen to this album. Go and buy it on vinyl. Experience it on its true form and lose yourself in this captivating music:
“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.
8/10”.
I have been thinking about Fir Wave – and Hannah Peel’s music – a bit lately. A composer and producer I have enormous respect for, I cannot wait to hear her next moves. Fir Wave is an album that I truly love. In fact, its most-streamed track, Emergence in Nature, is one of my favourite pieces of music of the past decade. Hannah Peel takes it on tour from 22nd September. Some very lucky people will get to see this amazing music in the flesh! If that is not recommendation enough, take time to listen to Fir Wave in full and…
WITNESS something truly wonderous.