Making music about natural processes or cosmic events is no easy task. Fluttering violins and shimmering percussion are a kneejerk stand-in for awe on many a nature documentary. Electronic music, ambient jazz and Björk, meanwhile, offer up more in the way of crustacean clicks and fissile atemporality.
On The Unfolding, Mercury-nominated composer Hannah Peel joins forces with Charles Hazlewood’s Paraorchestra, who combine disabled and non-disabled players on conventional and assisted instruments. They tackle the mineralisation of bones, the geological timescales of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, and pre-big bang times. Peel’s intentions are sound, the results are very pretty and the live shows will be great, but what ensues is still a modern classical-electronic crossover that relies too much on orthodox musicality to truly do its subjects justice.
The presence of a soaring soprano is almost laughably anthropocentric on a track called The Universe Before Matter. The usual tickboxes are out in full: bird calls, or their flute approximations, on Wild Animal and “ah”-ing choirs on Part Cloud. Every so often, though, Peel and Paraorchestra achieve wonderment: Passage is full of delicious atonal hovering, while If After Weeks of Early Sun offers arpeggiations, banging beats and joyous string stabs.
