Such is the long shadow of Covid that this is effectively the live launch of Hannah Peel’s acclaimed album Fir Wave, even if it comes nearly two years after it was released, and long after it was shortlisted for the 2021 Mercury prize. She explains tonight that it wasn’t even meant to be a proper LP: she was initially asked to remix a 1972 KPM album of library music called Electrosonic, created by BBC Radiophonic Workshop luminaries, but Peel became so immersed in the project that she ended up creating seven completely new pieces of music.
Many of the sounds she works with tonight are samples from that 1972 album – unique analogue synth voicings that were programmed by the likes of Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Don Harper – all played live by Peel and fellow synth wizard Hazel Mills. Peel is an acclaimed string arranger for the likes of Paul Weller, John Foxx and Erland Cooper (all of whom are in the audience tonight), and she occasionally switches to violin and piano, but the emphasis tonight is on the electronic.
Fir Wave is, superficially, an album that borrows from the bleeps and beats of dance music. But Peel takes us into more unexpected territory – the squelchy acid house of Patterned Formation is in 7/4 time; Reaction Diffusion is a piece of woozy electronica set to a Casiotone waltz rhythm; while the dreamy, gothic pulses of Carbon Cycle are in a constantly shifting time signature.
For her first encore Peel performs two tracks from her Rebox EPs: synthpop classics played on a small wind-up musical box, activated by long strips of coded paper. Sugar Hiccup by the Cocteau Twins and New Order’s Blue Monday are transformed into glittering, childlike nursery rhymes, sung in two-part harmony and beefed up by Mills’s synth basslines. Peel then plays a piece from her EP Unheard Delia, based around snippets of a revealing interview with her hero Delia Derbyshire, wreathed in elegiac synth strings.
It’s a triumphant show, and a tremendous appetiser for this venue’s Sound Unwrapped festival, for which Peel is artist in residence.
