Hannah Peel – Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia

If we lived in an alternative reality as good as the ones dreamed up by Hannah Peel, the Northern Irish artist would fast be approaching national treasure status such is the scope and originality of her work. Peel's recent output has included an album dealing with her grandmother's dementia, collaborations with Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve and her band The Magnetic North's fantastic concept album Prospect of Skelmersdale, which built a collection of songs around the unloved West Lancashire new town to great effect. 

This latest opus explores 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. So far so original, but what really tips this album into the box marked 'special' is Peel's decision to compose each piece using both analogue synthesizers and a full, traditional 29-piece colliery brass band. The results of which are extraordinary – think Vangelis if he was born in Frickley rather than Thessaly and you're almost there – as Peel uses the swelling tones of the brass to underlay the soothing ambient swirl of the synths. 

It's a truly unworldly sound and about as far away from the theme to Monty Python as you could get with the rich power of the traditional brass band mapping Mary’s intergalactic passage rather than the sound of a wet sunday in Grimethorpe. Although it's easy to mock Peel's grand idea to create "a seven-movement odyssey" what we should really be doing is praising one of modern electronic music's most enquiring and captivating minds whose skyscraping talent shows no sign of coming down just yet.

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