ES7135 seven-inch features Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang
‘TIGER SEX’
‘Tiger Sex’ is an intriguing title for the A-side of this month’s Electronic Sound seven-inch. This is synth sorceress Hannah Peel getting her groove on with Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang for one of the highlights of ‘The Endless Dance’, an album that blends Peel’s analogue bleepery with Wang’s wide and wild range of traditional and homemade drums.
“We took our inspiration from the Chinese solar calendar, which shows changes in the natural world, and something that kept coming up for us was the tiger and its mating season,” says Peel. “The album pivots around this track at the halfway point, giving an animalistic side to the record.”
As you will discover in our cover feature, ‘The Endless Dance’ arose from a series of live collaborations. Every time Peel and Wang performed together, they adapted their material to the reactions of the audiences, with ‘Tiger Sex’ evolving into a splendidly wonky club track. Wave your paws in the air like you just don’t care.
“It’s nice to have something on the album that’s essentially a dance track,” continues Peel. “I think it’s got an Underworld vibe to it, which I really love. Our producer Mike Lindsay sampled little sections of me speaking and then layered them over the top, adding a human touch to the electronics.”
As she talks about ‘Tiger Sex’, Peel consults the notes that she and Wang made during their five-day recording session at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the Wiltshire countryside. Skipping past the Chinese script, she picks out the sections in English.
“When you are full of adrenaline at a gig, time seems to slow down,” she says. “That was also the atmosphere in the room while we were trying ideas out. It felt like we had all the time in the world.”
‘OFFERINGS TO THE BEAST’
Turn the record over for ‘Offerings To The Beast’, which keeps to the animal theme but swaps felines for canines. Delve into ancient Chinese traditions and you’ll find dragon dogs, lion dogs and a sun-eating meteor dog. As with the A-side, it all connects to the seasons.
“The imagery we used for this track was based around a ritual to nature, with the dogs giving their offerings for the winter to make sure they’re safe,” explains Peel. “It’s a dialogue with unseen forces and a reminder that we live in nature but we don’t control it.”
Before they landed on the concept of the solar calendar, Peel and Wang were planning to demarcate the album according to materials. They had a metal track and a wood track, for example. They even had a skin track. The roar of the mythical creature in the title was too loud to ignore, though.
“This was originally called ‘Metal’, because lots of the elements in it were quite metallic,” notes Peel. “But the timpani was so distorted, it definitely sounded like a beast.”
The massive timpani melody that’s central to the track falls somewhere between the balls-out rave blasts of Altern 8 and the pastoral electronica of Ultramarine. It’s actually a direct sample from the first gig Peel and Wang played together, more about which in the feature. Listen carefully and you can hear the shuffle of bowls that couldn’t be edited out of the stem.
“Beibei would put these metal bowls on top of the timpani and then have a huge pedal underneath that tuned the drums,” recalls Peel. “I’d never seen anybody do that before. The result is truly beautiful.”
