Hannah Peel Playlist
Archival - July 17, 2024
Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.
Film
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The Poetic Diary of Ramuntcho Matta (Excerpt II)
Ramuntcho Matta May 30, 2024
How to become a better me?
But first, what do you call me? How do you call me? There are no special lines, no direct lines. There are only paths mades of confusions, pains and distraught. Paths mades of encounters, dances and sleeps…
Ramuntcho Matta May 30, 2024
I.
How to become a better me?
But first, what do you call me? How do you call me? There are no special lines, no direct lines. There are only paths mades of confusions, pains and distraught. Paths mades of encounters, dances and sleeps.
In the South of France there is a land that does not want to be a country. The people there do not want borders. Are there borders anyway?
I am here with a Basque cake, I sit on a bench and they come, all dressed in white, in red and strange hats.
All dressed in white?
It reminds me a song,
All dressed in black?
They come and they dance, each village has their own version. Does your body remember the dance? It does but you can’t recall.
Basque Identity is a moving cross, a representation of the four elements. But we know we have five elements. We have five fingers because we are five elements.
Every day, I will practice my five elements. Water > earth > wood > metal > fire. 3 times, sometimes more. This is the first exercise. At the beginning you will feel very little but after a few weeks you will start to enter in a new dimension and after 4 years you will be water, earth, wood, metal and fire.
You already have this in you but you are not trained to feed yourselves with those sensations.
II.
As a child becomes a flower when they see a flower…
you have to be water that becomes earth,
earth that becomes wood,
wood that becomes metal,
metal that becomes fire,
fire that becomes water,
water that becomes…
That becoming is the essence of being.
Being an animal,
being a human,
being a chair,
a nice meal,
an old stone.
The other day I was invited to present my drawings. In my life of brushstrokes, sometimes words show up. Where they come from is not relevant, where they drive me… that’s the point.
I started to play with my guitar and a dog showed up, so i wanted him to sing, and here we are, a dog’s song… the blues of a dog.
What is “me“ for a dog ? What is his “self“, his “I“? What is the balance between “I“ and “me“ that could make a better “self“?
A dog does not care about this because he does not care about knowing more: instead, he feels more. Much more.
I remember the song.
All dressed in black,
walking the dog,
being a dog…
III.
I can show you how to enter into that dimension. There are exercises and practices but if you are not ready it will be useless. Brion Gysin and Bill Burroughs wanted to create a school but very soon they felt that this kind of knowledge is not for everybody. So transmission should be more maieutics.
Back to the drawing: you see the triangle… “me“ is the body. “I“ the mind. How much of your body is your self? How much of your mind?
Do you mind?
Do you body?
“I don’t mind“,
What a curious sentence.
The rhythm of the phrases is at least as important as the meaning of the words. This is what Bill used to say.
Now you can feel more,
Feeling is not a knowledge
It is a dimension of being.
Ramuntcho Matta is a producer, sound designer and visual artist.
Robert Downey Jr.
2hr 19m
5.28.24
In this clip, Rick speaks with Robert Downey Jr. about the interplay between actors.
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Sator Squares (Artefact III)
Ben Timberlake May 28, 2024
It might be innocently regarded as perhaps the world’s oldest word puzzles, were it not for its association with assassinations, conflagrations and rabies…
WUNDERKAMMER
Ben Timberlake May 28, 2024
It might be innocently regarded as perhaps the world’s oldest word puzzles, were it not for its association with assassinations, conflagrations and rabies.
The “it” in question is the Sator Square. A Latin, five-line palindrome, it can be read from left or right, upwards or downwards. The earliest ones occur at Roman sites throughout the empire and by the Middle Ages, they had spread across northern Europe and were used as magical symbols to cure, prevent, and sometimes play a role in all sorts of wickedness. The one pictured here is set in the doorway of a medieval house in the semi-ruined village of Oppède le Vieux, Provence, France, carved to ward off evil spirits.
There are several different translations of the Latin, depending on how the square is read. Here is a simple version to get us started:
AREPO is taken to be a proper name, so, AREPO, SATOR (the gardener/ sower), TENET (holds), OPERA (works), ROTAS (the wheels/plow), which could come out something like ‘Arepo the gardener holds and works the wheels/plow’. Other similar translations include ‘The farmer Arepo works his wheels’ or ‘The sower Arepo guides the plow with care’.
Some academics insist that the square is read in a boustrophedon style, meaning ‘as the ox plows’, which is to say reading one line forwards and the next line backwards, as a farmer would work a field. Such a method would not only emphasize the agricultural nature of the square but also allow a more lyrical reading and could be very loosely translated thus: “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
“Early fire regulations from the German state of Thuringia stated that a certain number of these magical frisbees must be kept at the ready to stop town blazes.”
There are multiple translations and theories surrounding Sator Squares. They became the focus for intense academic debate about 150 years ago. Most of the early studies assumed that they were Christian in origin. The earliest known examples at that time appeared on 6th and 7th century Christian manuscripts and focussed on the Paternoster anagram contained within: by rearranging the letters, the Sator Square spells out Paternoster or ‘our father’, with the leftover A and O symbolizing the Alpha and the Omega.
However, in the 1920s and 30s, two Sator Squares were discovered within the ruins of Pompeii. The fatal eruption of Vesuvius that buried the city occurred in AD 79, and it is very unlikely that there were any Christians there so soon after Christ’s death. But the city did have a large Jewish community, and many contemporary scholars see the Jewish Tau symbol in the TENET cross of the palindrome, as well as other Talmudic references across the square, as proof of its Jewish origins. Pompeii’s Jews faced pogroms throughout their history, and it makes sense that they might try to hide an expression of their faith within a Roman word puzzle.
Sator Squares spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and appear in the margins of Christian manuscripts, in important treatises on magic, and in a medical book as a cure for dog-bites. Over time, they gained popularity amongst the poor as a folk remedy, even amongst those who had no knowledge of Latin or were even illiterate. (Being ignorant of meaning might increase the potency of the magic by concealing the essential gibberish of the script). In 16th century Lyon, France, a person was reportedly cured of insanity after eating three crusts of bread with the Sator Square written on them.
As the square traveled across time and country, nowhere was it used more enthusiastically than in Germany and parts of the Low Countries, where the words were etched onto wooden plates and thrown into fires to extinguish them. There are early fire regulations from the German state of Thuringia stating that a certain number of these magical frisbees must be kept at the ready to stop town blazes.
From the same period comes a more sinister use of the square: The Oath Skull. Discovered in Münster in 2015 it is a human skull engraved with the Sator Square and radiocarbon dated between the 15th and 16th Centuries. It is believed to have been used by the Vedic Courts, a shadowy and ruthless court system that operated in Westphalia during that time. All proceedings of the courts were secret, even the names of judges were withheld, and death sentences were carried out by assassination or lynching. One of the few ways the accused could clear their names was by swearing an oath. Vedic courts used Oath Skulls as a means of underscoring the life-or-death nature of proceedings, and it is thought that the inclusion of the Sator Square on this skull added another level of mysticism - and the threat of eternal damnation - to the oath ritual.
When the poor of Europe headed for the New World, they took their beliefs with them. Sator Squares were used in the Americas until the late 19th century to treat snake bites, fight fires, and prevent miscarriages.
For 2000 years, interest in the Sator Squares has not waned, and a new generation has been exposed to them through the release of Christopher Nolan’s film TENET, named after the square. The film, about people who can move forwards and backwards in time, makes other references too: ‘Sator’ is the name of the arch villain played by Kenneth Branagh; ‘Arepo’ is the name of another character, a Spanish art forger whose paintings are kept in a vault protected by ‘Rotas Security’. In the film, ‘Tenet’ is the name of the intelligence agency that is fighting to keep the world from a temporal Armageddon.
Sator Squares have been described as history’s first meme. They have outlasted empires and nations, spreading across the western world and taking on newfound significance to each civilization that adopts them. Arepo should be proud of his work.
Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.
Film
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Iggy Pop Playlist
Iggy Confidential
Archival - May 8, 2015
Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”
The Four of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 25, 2024
The Four of Swords is air, at a point of stillness and equilibrium. This is a card of calm, and of temporary resolution to internal problems…
Chris Gabriel May 25, 2024
The Four of Swords is air, at a point of stillness and equilibrium. This is a card of calm, and of temporary resolution to internal problems.
In this card we see beautiful but fragile rest, the violence of the suit brought to a brief standstill out of reverence to a higher force. This is a family dinner with differences put aside, a holiday party when bitter relatives agree to keep the peace for the sake of the season. There is something “higher” calling us to pause personal conflicts, whether it’s the religiosity and “goodwill” of a holiday, or the wellbeing of children and family. This is precisely the realm of Jupiter, that mercy and joy that beneficently orders conflict to cease for a moment.
This is in no way a solution, and may very well devolve into conflict if not carefully maintained, but it is a respite. We also see a serious divide in spiritual outlook between Rider and Thoth, when four, the stable number, is applied to swords. Is stability only truly attained in the grave? Or can a brief armistice give us the same thing?
Hamlet, yearning for peace, declares death the only end to heartache and the thousand natural shocks, but even then, the fear that this rest is illusion pervades his mind.
When dealt this card, we are being offered a temporary resolution, either to the internal conflicts within our restless minds, or the disagreements we have with those around us. Keep the truce, appreciate the respite, but prepare for things to break down, and quickly!
Questlove Playlist
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Archival - May Evening, 2024
Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Film
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The Power of Regret
Claudia Cockerell May 23, 2024
In the winter of 1981, a 22-year-old Texan called Bruce was on a train through Europe. A girl boarded at Paris and sat down next to him. They started chatting, and it felt like they’d known each other their whole lives. After a while they were holding hands. When it came to her stop they parted ways with a kiss. They never traded numbers, and Bruce didn’t even know her surname. “I never saw her again, and I’ve always wished I stepped off that train,” he wrote, 40 years on, in his submission to The World Regret Survey.
Claudia Cockerell May 23, 2024
In the winter of 1981, a 22-year-old Texan called Bruce was on a train through Europe. A girl boarded at Paris and sat down next to him. They started chatting, and it felt like they’d known each other their whole lives. After a while they were holding hands. When it came to her stop they parted ways with a kiss. They never traded numbers, and Bruce didn’t even know her surname. “I never saw her again, and I’ve always wished I stepped off that train,” he wrote, 40 years on, in his submission to The World Regret Survey.
It’s a website you should visit if you ever need some perspective. Set up by author Daniel Pink, it asked thousands of people from hundreds of countries to anonymously share their biggest regrets in life. It’s strangely intimate, delving into the things people wish they’d done, or not done at all, and the answers run the gamut of the human condition.
For all the people who regret cheating on their partners, there are just as many who wish they’d never married them in the first place. One 66-year-old man in Florida regrets “being too promiscuous,” while a 17-year-old in Massachusetts says “I wish I asked out the girls I was interested in.” The stories range from quotidian (“When I was 13 I quit the saxophone because I thought it was too uncool to keep playing”) to tragic (“Not taking my grandmother candy on her deathbed. She specifically requested it”).
Sometimes we feel schadenfreude when reading about other people’s failings, but there’s something about regret that is pathos-filled and painfully relatable. Flicking through the answers, many of people’s biggest regrets are the things they didn’t do. We fantasise about what could have been if only we’d moved countries, switched jobs, taken more risks, or told someone we loved them.
“It just wasn’t meant to be. I still long for the sea - and to be near the waves”.
Pink wrote a book about his findings, called The Power of Regret. “We’re built to seek pleasure and to avoid pain - to prefer chocolate cupcakes to caterpillar smoothies and sex with our partner to an audit with the tax man”, he states. Why then, do we use our regrets to self-flagellate, more often wondering “if only…” rather than comforting ourselves with “at least”?
“One of the biggest regrets I have is not moving to California after graduating college. Instead I stayed in the midwest, married a girl, and ended up getting divorced because it just wasn't meant to be. I still long for the sea - and to be near the waves,” writes one man in Nebraska. This pining reflects the rose tinted lens through which we look at what could have been. California with its rolling waves and sandy beaches is synonymous with a life of freedom, love, and joy.
Instead of categorising regrets by whether they are work, money, or romance related, Pink has created a new system, arguing that regrets fall into four core categories: foundation, moral, boldness and connection regrets. Within these groups, there are regrets of the things we did do (often moral), and things we didn’t do (often connection and boldness regrets). The things we didn’t do are frequently more painful because, as Pink says, ‘inactions, by laying eggs under our skin, incubate endless speculation’. So you’re better off setting up that business, or asking that girl out, or stepping off the train, because of the inherently limited nature of contemplating action versus inaction.
The actions which we do end up regretting are often moral failings that fall under the umbrella of a ten commandments breach. As well as adultery, larceny and the like, there’s poignant memories of childhood cruelty. A 56-year-old woman in Kansas still beats herself up about something she did 45 years earlier: “Throwing rocks at my former best friend in 6th grade as she walked home from school. I was walking behind her with my “new” friends. Terrible.”
But regrets can have a galvanising effect, if we choose to let them. Instead of wallowing in the sadness of wishing we could rewind time, or take back something horrible we said or did, we can use that angsty feeling as an impetus for change. “When regret smothers, it can weigh us down. But when it pokes, it can lift us up,” says Pink. There’s an old proverb which has probably been cross-stitched earnestly onto many a cushion, but I still like it as a mantra for overcoming pangs of regret: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.”
Claudia Cockerell is a journalist and classicist.
Tom O’Neill
2hr 45m
5.22.24
In this clip, Rick speaks with ‘CHAOS’ author Tom O’Neill about the mystery of Charles Manson’s magnetic persona.
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Grasping at Gesture
Isabelle Bucklow May 21, 2024
Whilst gestures are certainly not always in or about the hands, a hand, like a grain of sand, can be revelatory of whole worlds. In medicine and mysticism, the study of hands discloses underlying health conditions, your character, your life trajectory. Hands provide a helpfully concise locale from which to study how we communicate, behave, make, and think and what all that has to do with gesture. And so, for now, we’ll pursue them a little further, homing in on one particular muscular operation of the hands: grasping.
Isabelle Bucklow May 21, 2024
In the first of these texts on gesture, I traced an unreliable and partial history of hand gestures – from roman orators and Martine Syms, to teens on TikTok and TikToks of tech bros using Apple Vision Pro – and how, somewhere along the way we lost our gestures, or lost control of them; gesticulating wildly in the open air.
Whilst gestures are certainly not always in or about the hands, a hand, like a grain of sand, can be revelatory of whole worlds. In medicine and mysticism, the study of hands discloses underlying health conditions, your character, your life trajectory. Hands provide a helpfully concise locale from which to study how we communicate, behave, make, and think and what all that has to do with gesture. And so, for now, we’ll pursue them a little further, homing in on one particular muscular operation of the hands: grasping.
‘The essential traits of human technical gesticulation are undoubtedly connected with grasping’¹ said Andre Leroi-Gourhan in his 1965 book, Gesture and Speech. A pioneering anthropologist, Leroi-Gourhan traced evolving relationships between hands, tools, gestures, languages, and thoughts, and developed a corresponding science for such. He is associated with Structuralist school, which means that he sought out the underlying processes (or structures) that make systems meaningful. Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech does many things: It traces a bio-cultural evolution of postures, hands, brains, tools, art and language, up to the present day; conducts cross-cultural analysis of the rhythms and organization of human society, value systems, social behavior and techno-economic apparatus; and, amidst nascent developments in robotics and early experiments in automation, speculates on the future of our species.
“Once we started walking erect on two feet, our hands were liberated from locomotion and, lifted from the ground, free to do an awful lot.”
The book begins with a history of the human brain and hand, with Leroi-Gourhan explaining: ‘it seemed to me that the first thing to do was to measure the results of what can be done with the hand to see what [our]brains can think.’² In pursuing both brain and hand he opposed the prevailing approach in evolution studies to focus only on the ‘cerebral’. Leroi-Gourhan was interested in how thought is embodied, how it springs from material conditions.
So, what can be done with the hand? Once we started walking erect on two feet, our hands were liberated from locomotion and, lifted from the ground, free to do an awful lot; they could grip and grasp and gesture. Now grasping is not specific to humans – qualitatively, the hand that grasps remains a relatively rudimentary device that's accompanied us across many evolutionary stages – and there are a variety of types and properties of grasps. Studying the transition from instinctive to cultural uses of hands, Leroi-Gourhan observed the functional shift from the mouth to the hand, from the hand to the grasped tool, and finally the hand that operates the machine. When it comes to grasping, ‘the actions of the teeth shift to the hand, which handles the portable tool; then the tool shifts still further away, and a part of the gesture is transferred from the arm to the hand-operated machine’. This he describes as a gradual exteriorization, or ‘secretion’ of the hand-and-brain into the tool.
But gesture still somewhat eludes us, its location ambiguous. Gesture is not in and of the hand, nor in and of the tool, rather gesture is the meeting of brain, hand and tool, the driving force and thought that sets the tool to action. To bring these gestures to light, Leroi-Gourhan developed the methodology for which he is best known: the Chaîne Opératoire.
The Chaîne Opératoire, or operational chain, is a method that makes processes visible by documenting the sequence of techniques that bring things into being – be they tangible artifacts, ephemeral performances, or even the acquisition of intangible status. Leroi-Gourhan described a technique as ‘made of both gesture and tool, organized in a chain by a true syntax’. The use of ‘syntax’ here (Structuralists had a thing for linguistics) establishes a relationship between the processes and the performance of language where there is room for both shared meaning and individual flourishes. Here, gesture, like the arrangement of words in a sentence, is relational, acquiring its shape and meaning through the interaction of mind, body, tool, material and social worlds in which it participates.
This whole time thinking about grasping hands I’ve had a film in mind: Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead, in which morsels of lead fall from above, are caught, and then released by the artist's hand. Far from mechanically consistent, sometimes Serra grasps the object, sometimes he grasps at it, narrowing missing and smacking fingers to palm. From 1968 into the early 70s Serra made a series of other hand films whose subject matter are just as the titles suggest: in Hand Catching Lead a hand, of course, catches lead; in Hands Scraping (1968) two pairs of hands gather up lead shavings which have accumulated on the floor/filled the frame; in Hands Tied two tied-uphands untie themselves.
“The creative gesture evaded standard step by step documentation. And, in fact, even a pretty sharp representational tool.. can’t fully grasp all of a gesture's subtleties.”
Curator Søren Grammel said Serra’s hand works ‘demonstrate a particular action that can be applied to a material’. I suppose that’s what the Chaîne Opératoire gets at too, as well as demonstrating how the material acts on us; in Hand Catching Lead, the lead rubs off onto Serra’s blackened hands. And just as the Chaîne Opératoire observes the network of gestures that fulfill an operation, the duration of Serra’s films cosplay pragmatism, lasting as long as it takes to complete the task (however arbitrary): How many pieces of lead can you catch or not catch until you are exhausted/cramp-up/are no longer interested? How long does it take to sweep up lead shavings or untie a knot?
Serra’s Hand Catching Lead was prompted in part by being asked to document the making of House of Cards (a sculpture where four large lead sheets are propped against one another to form the sides of a cube). But a film following the making process would, he felt, be too literal and merely illustrative. Instead, Hand Catching Lead is a ‘filmic analogy’ of the creative process. Serra knew that the creative gesture evaded standard step by step documentation. And, in fact, even a pretty sharp representational tool like the Chaîne Opératoire can’t fully grasp all of a gesture's subtleties. It seems we have come up against the limits of this approach, and of Structuralism's commitment to linguistics. Returning to Agamben, who we met in the first text: ‘being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term…’³ Perhaps then Serra’s grasps are gags, grasping at lead, at air and at the irrepresentable nature of being-in-gesture.
¹ Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993) [1965]), 238
² ibid.,146
³ Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 59
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
Film
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Lobby Loyde - Play with George Guitar (Out of Print)
Matt Sweeney May 20, 2024
Australian rock legend Lobby Loyd is sorta like Lemmy, Neil Young, and Malcolm Young and this album is him on a ton of acid. His band Coloured Balls’ essential 1973 album is “Ball Power.” A mint copy of the vinyl cost like $500 in the ‘90’s.
Matt Sweeney May 20, 2024
Australian rock legend Lobby Loyd is sorta like Lemmy, Neil Young, and Malcolm Young and this album is him on a ton of acid. His band Coloured Balls’ essential 1973 album is “Ball Power.” A mint copy of the vinyl cost like $500 in the ‘90’s.
Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his “Superwolf” album, and invited him to play on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.
The Six of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 11, 2024
The World card is a cosmogram, meaning it depicts the whole of the cosmos. We find a naked woman floating within a ring, her legs crossed and something flowing about her. She is Maya, the embodied force of creation and illusion. Her dancing and spinning manifests the material world. The Four Cherubs frame the corners as symbols of the states of matter…
Chris Gabriel May 18, 2024
The Six of Swords is a rare positive card in the suit. Here the winds of thought are well directed, and applied with intention and effect. This is a card of knowledge, and the acquisition thereof.
The Beauty of the Prince is his science, the way he learns, understands, and applies that knowledge.
As I’ve expressed before, the suit of swords evokes Hamlet, and this is the image of Hamlet the Scientist, Hamlet the Psychologist. Seen as such, we can interpret a great deal of Hamlet’s actions as experiments; consider the Mousetrap. Hamlet hypothesizes that Claudius kills his father, he puts on a play he calls “The Mousetrap” to prove this. The play’s the experiment!
As for Rider, we can think again to Hamlet, to his general ability to survive the treacherous court, feigning madness, going unpunished for murder, making off with pirates, evading execution, etc. His death is in many ways a suicide (which we’ll see later in the suit). But clearly, his understanding of his situation allows him to survive and escape death.
Thoth shows this science applied to the rosy cross, which is the symbol on the back of all Thoth cards. The rosy cross is a cosmogram, whose arms are the four elements, and whose petals are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In essence, an esoteric depiction of the universe, making this card a symbol of esoteric study itself.
When dealt this card we are being given an opportunity to develop our understanding of the things around us, to create a science of ourselves, and to then apply that knowledge in our lives.
Hannah Peel Playlist
Metatron’s Cube 2
Archival - April 23, 2024
Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.
Film
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