Hannah Peel at King’s Place

Composer Hannah Peel is an artist in residence for this year’s Sound Unwrapped series at King’s Place, the creative hub in North London that invariably has some of the most interesting music and events programmed. To celebrate her tenure, yesterday she performed her 2021 album Fir Wave live for the first time in a double concert, one starting at 7pm and the other at 9pm. The new immersive sound system installed in the performance hall by D&B Audiotechnik were put to good use, making the most of Peel’s intricate ambience and occasionally thumping moods.

Peel explains how Fir Wave came to be: “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.” She then made new electronic instruments from samples. The musician was a chipper hostess, chatting happily and then admonishing herself for talking too much; but, actually, listening to her discuss her process was welcome and fascinating.

She’s very talented. Throughout the show one didn’t know what she would be performing on next: here she was playing a violin, knee-deep in dry ice; there she was at the piano; next she was winding some paper into a music box and playing that while singing.

The room was dimly lit and the stage dressed with stick lighting whose illumination sequences reflected the music. For Pattern Recognition, they radiated white light from their cores in a discernible cycle; for other numbers they glowed like the dying embers of a fire. Emergence in Nature got a big reaction, and some of the seated guests would clearly have liked to rave, judging from the shoulder twitching and techno necks going on. It’s a heavy, pulsing piece that owes its majesty and awe to the natural world.

The album tracks were accompanied by a bonus of an encore featuring the Cocteau Twins’ Sugar Hiccup (well suited to Peel’s sweet, clear voice) and New Order’s Blue Monday. She ended with Unheard Delia Part One, which samples recordings the artist found of Derbyshire being interviewed in her flat, lamenting that she was not better recognised. Peel is doing her bit to promote the legacy of a basically unknown pioneer of electronic music, while showing how accomplished she is herself.

Jessica Wall
Photos: Monika S Jakubowska

further information and future events visit Hannah Peel’s website here.

Watch the video for the single Emergence in Nature here: