Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang 'The Endless Dance'

The Endless Dance is the first collaborative album from Northern Irish producer and composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The record is grounded in the strength of ancient concepts, but comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, Peel and Wang travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion.

Both genre-defying, storied artists in their own right, Peel and Wang met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON. Wang was struck by Peel’s titular composition; a speculative portrait of the noise and lights of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Peel’s uncanny ability to evoke the atmosphere of a city she had never been to led the pair to collaborate on a series of performances, beginning with a fully improvised show at Kings Place in London, June 2023. They immediately began to map out a new, imagined space through sound. “In our heads, it was a place that neither of us had been to,” explains Peel. Perhaps this is somewhere no-one has been to before. “We wanted to create a different type of world through imagination,” she adds. The artistic freedom and chemistry of these performances led to The Endless Dance, something of a permanent record of their shared musical landscape, informed by the flora and fauna that emerge and retreat through the seasons.

The album is collaged together from recordings made over five days at legendary rural studio Real World, a setting which aligned with the duo’s inspiration from the natural world. With their intentions set and shared musical language already established, Peel and Wang created sounds without self-consciousness, locking into tones and rhythms that felt fun and energetic. Opening track ‘Wild Geese Arrive’ is based around a marimba warm-up that Wang didn’t even know was being recorded. The interweaving polyrhythms of ‘Tiger Sex’ are joined by a sample of Peel’s echoing voice encouraging Wang to keep going. Even Peel’s hiccups were recorded and sampled on ‘Wild Geese Arrive’. Peel and Wang were encouraged to utilise these humorous, human moments by producer Mike Lindsay [LUMP, Tunng, Guy Garvey, Jon Hopkins] who brought a new level of energy and creativity to the record as he was given free rein to try out ideas. “Mike loves elements that are nuanced, like breath or the noises in a room,” says Peel, who highlights Lindsay's organic sensibility towards the work. “It was important to find a producer who could pull together something human and connected, that you could dance to, or you could put on while traveling to new destinations.”

Peel used a Prophet-6 synth for arpeggiated and chordal synth patterns, a Lyra-8 for oscillating delays, a Moog Sound Studio Trio for beats and pulses and screws placed in between strings of a grand piano. Wang echoed the varying timbres of Peel’s electronics using her suite of traditional Chinese instruments – from water percussion to temple bells – alongside some unusual additions, like rice bowls from her kitchen and even a jawbone instrument, which can be heard on ‘Mantis vs. Horse’. On ‘Awaken The Insects’, Wang’s voice is a key percussive element, rapping in a rhythmic duet with bamboo clappers called Kuai Ban (快板). She sounds angry and defiant, but she’s actually reciting a tongue-twister she learnt as a child. “As soon as I showed it to my Chinese friends, they could not stop laughing,” says Wang. “It's just so silly, and I didn’t know I could do it.” Tongue twisters have a long tradition in Chinese comedic and performing arts (曲艺), and both artists credit this strong sense of play to the supportive relief of working with a fellow female artist, free of the competitive expectations of patriarchy.

The Endless Dance certainly represents a step-change from the duo’s shared classical backgrounds – but their knowledge and training is also the foundation of its freewheeling audacity, giving them the confidence to trust their instincts. In the music’s instrumentation and form, they drew from Wang’s training in both Chinese and Western musical systems. “The Western world has an orchestral system, but in ancient China instruments were categorised by the material they're made out of: metal, earth, skin, bamboo, very connected to nature,” she explains. “The West has a 12-note system, but Chinese scales are ongoing, so it’s one but also infinite notes. We were influenced by these two sound systems and how the cultures behind them blend together.” On the languid ‘Limit of Heat’, bending synth tones and bubbling water percussion meander freely, juxtaposed with the grounding notes of a grand piano. The duo are joined by Hyelim Kim on Daegeum, a Korean flute with “colourful overtones on every note”. 

The sessions were also rooted in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which emphasises the importance of harmony and intuition. “We appreciate and value what we're doing in the moment – this is very Taoism,” says Wang. “We don't worry about the result, we don't stress about so much preparation. We don't resolve the chords; we let them go on and on, letting them flow, and letting nature guide us.” This state is embodied in the free-flowing movements of ‘Mantis vs Horse’, a supremely danceable melee of clip-clopping percussion and arpeggiated synth that grows and develops with organic wonder; and on ‘Thunder Begins to Soften’, a relaxed rumble of beats and wobbling notes – the sound of organisms powering down and conserving energy so they can start up again. As with the Chinese calendar, The Endless Dance is intended as a never-ending cycle of sound, in tune with the rhythms of nature and human life.

The duo see their different cultural perspectives as a strength. Track to track, The Endless Dance is unpredictable and unexpected, which is in part due to the genuine curiosity and outside perspectives that each player brought to the sessions. “I am so familiar with Chinese heritage, but I don't see how it can present in electronics, for instance,” says Wang. “Hannah comes in with that direction, to imagine what the sounds could be together.” The characterful richness of the album stems from the commonalities they found in the sessions. “We both come from cultures where story is really important,” explains Peel. “The attention to detail comes from telling a story, and one note can set that off in a different direction.” The Endless Dance is a major work from two accomplished, singular artists – but it’s also the sound of mutual curiosity and shared fun, or as Wang puts it: “Two women talking in totally different languages that had a wonderful chat.”