Hannah Peel - All That Matters

How the hell is this not HUGE? Synthpop that sounds a bit chvrches, but her album's a bit more kate bush+caribou /dumbeasycomparisons but about her grandmother's dementia. It's kinda great.

(bad video tho imo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foIJn4vqFEY

Live, arps and synths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vROEZvXWMHE

Live, piano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BNOzGvWBIA

And I'll stop now, but just one more, at the more bush/caribou end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nivLqAhWok

She's been knocking about for a few years, I saw her in 2010 at a dance music festival on Croatia - the sort where the live acts are mostly there to gently soundtrack people's hangovers.

I went home and listened to her stuff and it was all pleasant but lightweight. This album is an order of magnitude better though - I like it when it goes all deep and abstract in the second half.

Reminds me more of Julia Holter than any of the artists you've mentioned though.

yeah holter for sure

I'm actually talking about the album - Awake But Always Dreaming, which is excellent.

OMG this album.

I know right? I think I played it three or four times this weekend. Helps that it's perfect autumnal music.

It's amazing how it wends its way from "All That Matters" to "Foreverest", her range is so broad but in this really effortless and unassuming way.

It should be warming up here but we're in some fucking ice age at the moment and this is perfect music for it.

The way "Foreverest" starts off wispy fragmented witch-dream, then gets stuck in some malfunctioning machine, then transmutes into a Mikkel Metal schaffel tune is pretty O_O

I'm a big fan, of course. Naturally, I came to her work from being namedeopped by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and because she toured as part of The Maths with John Foxx.

*namedropped

Totally obsessed with this album.

First listen and I think I'm in love

What's really impressive about this album is how natural the drift from left-of-centre indiepop into bedroom ambient house actually feels. At no point does it feel contrived or self-conscious.

Not my usual thing but digging this on first pass

Her approach feels very, um, diffuse to me, like, rather than a single identifiable voice she seems to corral together a lot of competing voices in a dialogue that feels very real - ironically, perhaps this is why the album doesn't feel as idiosyncratic or diverse as it is: the absence of a definable core also means that there's nothing against which to measure what might otherwise seem like experiments, genre exercises, populist appeals etc.

Perhaps this is also why the space she explores - effectively, between Susanne Sundfor and Julia Holter - seems to make intuitive sense at an abstract level as well as at a sonic level, given that Holter in particular (but also, to a lesser extent, Sundfor) are similarly "decentered" artists.

Also, if most of this album recalls The Ninth Wave (in feel, in subject matter and in narrative attack) more than just about anything anyone has recorded since (which I guess makes "All That Matters", "Hope Lasts" and "Don't Take It Out On Me" the sop to side A of that album, but much more distantly), one of the qualities that Peel has resuscitated from it is the sense of these voices crowding around the narrator: most obviously the muted "wake up!" towards the end of the otherwise-instrumental "Octavia", but also the sorrowful "where did you go?" during "Conversations".

i loooooooove this album holy shit

^^^^ very good brad

i mean the last song is a paul buchanan cover how could i not

Thank you for ths thread NotEnough, "All That Matters" is exactly what I need in my life.

I love this album, thanks to thread for telling me about it.

Rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is my favourite album of the year. I've also only just discovered that it's a concept album about slipping into Alzheimer's, the dense fog of the second half of the record makes so much sense in that context.

Yeah, it's not like it doesn't make sense without that link, but once you know it everything sort of snaps into focus. Again, very similar to The Ninth Wave IMO.

Funny how tunes like "Invisible City" and "Conversations" are so obviously directly addressing this subject matter once you're aware. It's a real "ohhh" moment.

wow, this is fantastic

This is by some way my favourite album of last year. She was fantastic live as well.

i didn't see this in EOY.. so i didn't vote it :-(

It's in there

"awake but still dreaming" is amaaaazing

I was introduced to her work via OMD (who sampled her) and also because she was part of John Foxx and The Maths. Predictably, I like her stuff a hell of a lot.

uh i need to hear this whole album

There's an intriguing sounding new album called Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia coming soon too: http://thequietus.com/articles/22537-new-hannah-peel-single

this sounds highly promising

Performing a short free gig at the South Bank in a couple of weeks https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/121724-mary-casio-journey-cassiopeia-2017

I can't stop listening to her new single. It seems weird to call it a single. It reminds me very much of Penguin Cafe Orchestra in mood and composition, although the execution is a bit more epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEZjDpwuM-w

I'm not sure when Hannah Peel turned into Tangerine Dream, but this is absolutely incredible.

Is the new album out? Everything I've heard from it has sounded like a kosmische colliery band and has been fantastic.

Well, it's on Spotify.

Look, it's like Acid Brass live at Kölner Dom in wibbletastic glory. But more elegant and elegiac.

This is so much my alley, it's rifling through my bins and piecing together my credit card receipts.

The little music box interlude on the final song, Planet of Passed Souls, just sent shivers down my spine.

She has a way of being completely EPIC!!!! and MAGNIFICENT!!! and SPACERAWK!!!!!! and yet somehow completely intimate at the same time?

this is unbelievable

holy crap

chipping in to say that all comments above are true.

first thought it was great, but was panned and mixed weirdly, then the colliery band brought a wall of sound right where I had thought something was missing,

and I was like "ah yes"

kicking myself for not making it out the the southbank show a month or so back....

Fucking hell

Damnit, I need to hear this. ABAD was a top 5er for me last year - this woman is incredibly talented.

This is everything that you all said it was. Holy shit what a record. Those horns are used so perfectly to blend with the synths to create such sonic harmony, timbral harmony, even. Think it was the beginning of Andromeda, but there's a moment where a horn comes in, is drenched in reverb and surrounded by analog synth tones and blends to become a whole. Another track utilized the intense bottom end on a bass synth tone to fill in the horns filling up the middle of the frequencies. This album is really well mixed.

it's like a synthony! Alright, back to bed.

She is so good. Glad to see someone who got their start on my friend's label Static Caravan reaching these levels. She completely deserves it. I think each release of hers eclipses the previous one.

this album was incredible

certainly one of the best of the year. feel like it'll be overlooked.

(and by that I mean the Mary Casio album)

If you include last year's Magnetic North album she's made three tremendous albums in two years. Hard to think of another artist in such great form right now.

I love this year's album and the one from last year that I knew, don't know of the Magnetic North but will seek that out

Just ordered it from Juno. Wish she'd put out her covers EP on a 10" or something. Double 7" would be tasty.

3-hour "New Year space mix" up on BBC for another few days - I'll probably have to finagle some sort of VPN to listen to it when I'm home:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kg5xd

I saw Hannah with Tubular Brass the other night in London and want to encourage anyone who gets a chance to see her (either alone, or with them) to do so. It was quite astounding. They did mary casio; and then tubular brass did their arrangement of tubular bells, which I wasn't expecting at all but was lovely. She's a perfectly lovely and nice person as well. Very grateful I got a chance to see this as her chances of bringing all of this to the US ever are pretty much nil due to the expense.

also: the chorus boy at the end of the Mary Casio album: this is a recording of her grandfather from the early 20th century. Not sure if this has been noted anywhere else; the guy from Tubular Brass informed everyone after her set.

Took awhile for me to get into the record as all that matters is a classic pop misdirection move. The rest of the album feels closer to the sideways pop of hukkelberg or stina nordenstam

Remix album: https://hannahpeel.tmstor.es/cart/product.php?id=37199

hell yeah

New collaborative album Chalk Hill Blue with a poet, Will Burns:

https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2019/01/will-burns-hannah-peel-chalk-hill-blue/

New album on Bandcamp tomorrow apparently.

yes looking forward to it. She's a treasure.

whaaaaaaaat yes! Her last two were amazing. Hope her voice makes a return on this one

Oh, it's a live version of Chalk Hill Blue from the Barbican. I mean I was at that gig, it was incredible, but I'd psyched myself up for new material.

i'm super fucking bummed I missed that Barbican show last summer, so it'll be nice to hear this

or whenever it was, now I can't remember

Is this more like it? Assembled from a TV soundtrack.

https://hannahpeelmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-deceived-original-tv-soundtrack

Oh, I need to hear this! I really failed to connect with Chalk Hill Blue, and I'm curious as to her future directions.

If you can bear the thought of yet another effectively instrumental Hannah Peel album rather than a proper follow-up to Awake But Always Dreaming, her new (quite short) album Fir Wave is marvellous, very much in keeping with the more abstract and foreboding stretches of that album, and less ambient / film score than a lot of her material since then.

Seems to be a concept album about the natural world along the lines of Bjork’s Biophilia.

I don’t she’s ever going to do another record like ‘Awake’. She’s been pretty clear in interviews that she’s been there, done that, and prefers to move on.

it's extremely lovely, received my copy the other day and played it for the first time last night.

she’s been there, done that

so she's never singing again? her voice and songwriting are too good to just "move on" from

I haven't listened to anything she's done since Mary Casio for some reason, but this new one is hitting all of my buttons. Excited to explore more of her back catalog.

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. Peel's singing again, and it's not what you'd expect! Absolutely gorgeous, probably my favorite music of hers since Awake But Always Dreaming.

https://hannahpeelmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-unfolding