It took Hannah Peel five years to make her 2016 album, Awake But Always Dreaming, which she told us was inspired by a desire to understand her grandmother’s dementia.
Her next album though will arrive just a year on from its predecessor, and you can check out the lead track, ‘Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula’, streaming above right now.
It’s the first insight into Peel’s third album, entitled Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, which will be released in September, with the record described rather grandly as a "seven-movement odyssey composed for analogue synthesisers and full, traditional 29-piece colliery brass band". The album’s lead track is a fitting first look at the ambitions set out on Peel’s new record, built around soaring orchestral arrangements that delight as much in the presence of the various instruments involved as they do in the space between each movement, building to a particularly rousing climax.
The new record, set to be released via My Own Pleasure on September 8 is said to explore "one person’s journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself".
The album was recorded with a complete brass band and rhythm section live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with the team from Peter Gabriel’s Real World record.
"I wanted these huge slabs of planetary sounds to echo the excitement and wonder of our human need to explore and develop," says Peel of the combinations of brass and analogue synthesisers featured on the new album. "Outer space is where only a select few can reach; yet it is somewhere we dream of going, or perhaps collectively, simply wanting to know what is out there. The unparalleled vastness in our galaxy is as equally melancholy and desolate, as Mary’s lonely voyage away from all she knows."
You can check Hannah Peel’s full list of upcoming live dates in which she will preview the new album here. You can pre-order the new album here.
