Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia

Liner notes

Hannah Peel’s third album, originally released in September 2017, is a seven-movement odyssey composed for analogue synthesizers and traditional 29-piece colliery brass band.  ‘Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’, which is being re-issued on 31 October, 2025 via Real World Records, explores one person’s journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself.

The brass band and rhythm section – ‘Tubular Brass’ – features the top UK championship brass band players who were recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team. These recordings were then expertly combined with Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production to create a wholly unique, collaborative sound; a first of its kind both live and on record.

Hannah: “The live recording of synths and the 29-piece colliery brass band in Barnsley was really out of this world for us all. It is hard to describe in words the overwhelming force of the music as it embraces the air around you. It’s as if the atmosphere is pulsing. The sonorous breath and power of 29 players mixed with the sub-bass on the Moog, resonates on your chest and plunges deep into your innards – propelling you into another realm. The journey to Cassiopeia becomes real and almost touchable.”

The re-issue comes with updated artwork by original designer, Grammy award winning, Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’) and remastered audio.

Hannah: “I wanted these huge slabs of planetary sounds to echo the excitement and wonder of our human need to explore and develop. Outer space is where only a select few can reach; yet it is somewhere we dream of going, or perhaps collectively, simply wanting to know what is out there. The unparalleled vastness in our galaxy is as equally melancholy and desolate, as Mary’s lonely voyage away from all she knows”. 

During her teenage years in Yorkshire, Peel played trombone in brass bands: marching at weekends and wearing ‘dickie bows’ at competitions and so naturally the ‘brass’ sound has become very much a part of her creative DNA. This love has recently come full circle once again, as Peel is the presenter of the series ‘Brass Banding with Hannah Peel’ for BBC Radio 3.

Mary Casio explores two very different worlds – the power of the brass band players combined with the sub-bass impact and air resonating force of the synths but Peel also creates a very human and intimate, at times fragile sounding record through her collection of ‘breathing’ vintage electronics, found sounds, the nuances of the individual brass instruments and the subtle ambience of her voice combining with the real and raw breathing, shuffling and ‘spit’ of the players themselves.

At the close of the album’s final song ‘The Planet of Passed Souls’, tutti brass jostle with the hiss and crackle of a 78rpm record. An emotionally charged, scratchy sample taken from a 1928 recording of Peel’s own choirboy grandfather in Manchester Cathedral leaves the listener questioning the reality of Mary’s connection with the stars… Did she ever make it to Cassiopeia? Is this all a daydream as she sits in a back garden shed tinkering with electronics and her telescope? Or maybe this is her final breath as her mind and body pass into another realm of life? Is this science or fantasy? And how much is there really a division between the two?

As Isaac Newton’s stated on his discoveries in 1692, “…be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers”.