Hannah Peel and Paraorchestra: The Unfolding

Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel (Mercury Music Prize and Emmy nominee) has come together with the ground-breaking Paraorchestra to create a new album, The Unfolding. For In The Studio, we discover what lies behind Hannah’s creative vision: as thoughts of deep time and our shared roots as human beings in the universe swirled around her mind, she found the genesis of the project. We hear how the idea developed out of Hannah’s early melodic sketches and how it bloomed from there to celebrate Paraorchestra’s progressive approach to what an orchestra should be - mixing analogue, digital and assistive instruments with a unique ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians. As the record finally comes out into the world, we discover what it took to record it in morsels of time over three years, in the midst of a global pandemic.