The Endless Dance is the first collaborative album from Northern Irish producer and composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The record is grounded in the strength of ancient concepts, but comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, Peel and Wang travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion.

Both genre-defying, storied artists in their own right, Peel and Wang met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON. Wang was struck by Peel’s titular composition; a speculative portrait of the noise and lights of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Peel’s uncanny ability to evoke the atmosphere of a city she had never been to led the pair to collaborate on a series of performances, beginning with a fully improvised show at Kings Place in London, June 2023. They immediately began to map out a new, imagined space through sound. “In our heads, it was a place that neither of us had been to,” explains Peel. Perhaps this is somewhere no-one has been to before. “We wanted to create a different type of world through imagination,” she adds. The artistic freedom and chemistry of these performances led to The Endless Dance, something of a permanent record of their shared musical landscape, informed by the flora and fauna that emerge and retreat through the seasons.

The album is collaged together from recordings made over five days at legendary rural studio Real World, a setting which aligned with the duo’s inspiration from the natural world. With their intentions set and shared musical language already established, Peel and Wang created sounds without self-consciousness, locking into tones and rhythms that felt fun and energetic. Opening track ‘Wild Geese Arrive’ is based around a marimba warm-up that Wang didn’t even know was being recorded. The interweaving polyrhythms of ‘Tiger Sex’ are joined by a sample of Peel’s echoing voice encouraging Wang to keep going. Even Peel’s hiccups were recorded and sampled on ‘Wild Geese Arrive’. Peel and Wang were encouraged to utilise these humorous, human moments by producer Mike Lindsay [LUMP, Tunng, Guy Garvey, Jon Hopkins] who brought a new level of energy and creativity to the record as he was given free rein to try out ideas. “Mike loves elements that are nuanced, like breath or the noises in a room,” says Peel, who highlights Lindsay's organic sensibility towards the work. “It was important to find a producer who could pull together something human and connected, that you could dance to, or you could put on while traveling to new destinations.”