Now Playing: The Magnetic North

We’ve had this stunning piece of work on heavy rotation this weekend. LIPA’s own, and Liverpool’s adopted Hannah Peel travelled to the Orkney isles with Erland Cooper (Erland and the Carnival), Simon Tong of The Verve and The Good, the Bad and the Queen and created a modern classical album inspired by Cooper’s birthplace, the Orkney Islands.

Fitful, beguiling, beautiful and vivid, the pieces - more like tone poems than songs - map these windswept, magic-laced lands perfectly. Each is named after, and recalls, a site-specific feature, from famous sea stacks to desolate beaches and lofty hills - airy, hallucinatory and full of quiet wonder. For any expedition of these lands, as close to a GPS as music gets.

Each score offers to take you to a different place altogether - ideal, perhaps for the return to work after four days holiday. Reminiscent of King Creosote & Jon Hopkins Diamond Mine. We’re addicted.

The Magnetic North