Caught by the River

Will Burns & Hannah Peel – Chalk Hill Blue

23rd January 2019

Announcing Chalk Hill Blue, the first album by Will Burns and Hannah Peel, which is to be released on our label Rivertones on Friday 22 March.

Chalk Hill Blue is a record of electronic ruralism channeling lives threaded through the chalk landscapes of Southern England. Watch Will and Hannah introduce it below:

Will Burns is Caught by the River poet-in-residence, and Hannah Peel is a frequent fixture of Caught by the River festival stages – both with the ‘cosmic colliery’ electronica of her solo work, and with orchestral place-rock band The Magnetic North (of which Chalk Hill Blue producer Erland Cooper is also a member.)

As part of their collaboration, Burns, Peel and Cooper walked the landscapes around Burns’s Wendover house together: their chalk-heeled boots tracing shared routes through the rhythms and repetitions of the place. What emerges in Chalk Hill Blue is a site-specific-non-specific record of creative place portraiture; an album that traces elements of a living landscape, and reworks them into something that is as sensitive and finely-observed as it is visionary.

Burns’s words and Peel’s sounds – deftly fused by Cooper’s sympathetic production – channel the minute shifts in the air and atmosphere of a place, and their resulting emotional effects. The spoken words and sound worlds on Chalk Hill Blue often seem to emerge from subliminal processes of call and answer; a fertile blurring of collective inspiration and intention circling this abstracted chalk landscape.

Perhaps if Delia Derbyshire’s later years in Cumbria had been happier then a record like this might have emerged from the fells, or alternatively if Virginia Astley’s gardens had contained a modular synth or two. Other triangulation points might include Hans Joachim Roedelius’s bucolic kosmiche reveries, Joanna Brouk’s new age minimalism, or James Yorkston’s ambient spoken word experiments. Like the butterfly with which it shares its name, Chalk Hill Blue is a rare thing: a glorious electric pastoral shimmer.

(Adapted from a beautiful bio written by Rob St John, November 2018.)

Vinyl pre-orders from the Caught by the River and Hannah Peel online shops come with an exclusive signed and numbered LP-sized ‘Summer Blues’ letterpress print, limited to an edition of 200 and produced in Nick Hand’s Bristol studio. All LPs and CDs will be signed by Will and Hannah. Order yours here. You can listen to ‘The Night Life’, taken from the album, here.

Will and Hannah will be performing Chalk Hill Blue live on the following dates:

30.03.19 – Caught By The River Calder at The Trades Club – HEBDEN BRIDGE (tickets)

04.04.19 – Cecil Sharp House – LONDON (tickets)

05.05.19 – Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival – BELFAST (tickets)

11.05.19 – Queens Hall – EDINBURGH (tickets)

21.05.19 – Theatre Severn – SHREWSBURY (tickets)

24.05.19 –  Sea Change Festival – TOTNES (tickets)

06.07.19 – Timber Festival – FEANEDOCK (tickets)

28.07.19 – Port Eliot Festival – ST GERMANS (tickets)

15.09.19 – The Good Life Experience – HAWARDEN (tickets)

01.11.19 – The Civic, Assembly Room – BARNSLEY (tickets)