The Unfolding

A collaboration between Hannah Peel, Paraorchestra and Charles Hazlewood

The Unfolding is an extraordinary eight-part collaboration between composer Hannah Peel (Mercury Prize and Emmy nominee), Paraorchestra, and Charles Hazlewood, released via Real World Records 1 April 2022.

Order / Listen: https://smarturl.it/RW241

THE UNFOLDING LIVE - 2022

5 May - Edinburgh Assembly Rooms
6 May - Gateshead Sage
21 May - London Barbican
21 July - Bluedot Festival headline performance

Commissioned by Paraorchestra, The Unfolding was written by Hannah Peel and recorded in precious morsels of time around the pandemic. Conducted by Hazlewood and featuring a 14-piece ensemble of acoustic and electronic instruments as well as human voice, The Unfolding takes a cyclical journey from the very atoms of human existence and the awakening of life, through to our eventual re-folding back into the elements.

The collaboration’s roots go back to early 2018, when Charles Hazlewood met Peel to ask if she’d consider writing for them. He’d first come across her “very randomly” some years earlier, he remembers, on YouTube, playing her music box cover version of ‘Tainted Love’ – he was particularly impressed that she’d made the music box herself. “I thought, wow, such skill, such creative imagination – I'm putting her down right now in my little book is someone that we ought to be trying to work with.” Since their first coffee onwards, it’s been “an unmitigated pleasure” he says. “She’s incredibly self-effacing and incredibly generous, her eyes and ears wide open to every tiny detail in the room.”

Peel then saw the Paraorchestra performing and was overwhelmed by the “energy about everything they do… and their ability to adapt and change and shift and mould”. She found their versatility and collective capability incredibly inspiring. “I wanted to write them something that I felt was encompassing of who they are, and what they can achieve and what they bring to a show – which is this incredible energy and an incredible reminder of the human form and the human spirit.”

Charles Hazlewood says: “It’s been an amazing journey, collaborating on this album with Hannah. The opportunity to bring together Hannah’s amazing skills as a composer with the extraordinary talents of our Paraorchestra’s musicians, and allow it to evolve gradually and naturally as we navigated the restrictions of the pandemic, means that we have created something incredibly new and organic.”

 Header and index image credit Kat Gollock