“As soon as I started to play I was transported back eight years, back to when I was in Japan, standing in Shinjuku Station at midnight,” she says. “Then I looked down at the score and saw the piece was named ‘Shinjuku’, and I knew then that this person and I had some kind of special connection.”

The piece in question was part of a wider suite called NEON, commissioned by classical music disruptors Manchester Collective for a run of shows (and later an LP) back in 2022, with world-class percussionist Wang as a special guest. The funny thing is, Peel had never even been to Japan, let alone Shinjuku, as Wang discovered the day they first met, at lunch break during rehearsals. 

“I was so surprised,” she says, laughing. “It felt kind of crazy after that magical moment I’d had when she took me right back there.” But, just as she’d predicted, a friendship did sprout.

“I immediately found her so interesting,” says Peel, recalling their first meeting. “Then, after the recording session, when I looked at her Instagram and saw her Water, Paper, Earth concertos and all the other amazing things she does, I started to wonder what it might sound like with electronics, and maybe there was something in it that could be fun.”

Months later, when dreaming up a three-night residency at King’s Place in London, where each show would be different from the others, Peel thought of Wang and called her up. “I wanted to do something fun that didn’t require rehearsals,” she says, explaining how she’d had an idea of creating a sort of map together through improvisation, “like a continuation of the conversations we’d had about imagining places we’d never been to, but through music.” “That’s kind of where it all started, even though we hadn’t really spoken that much since we’d met, we just decided to do it.”

Turning up on the day of the show, it was clear from early on in soundcheck that there was something special in the room, and both women sensed it. “We had no idea what we were going to play but we knew it was going to be good, and it was,” says Peel. “It was a hot day outside and lots of people came, and it was really, really magical, a lot of fun.”

Though the thought of making an album hadn’t crossed their minds before, suddenly it seemed almost predestined, a thing that simply had to happen. Or at least be tried, because translating a live show into a studio setup is no easy thing – a wholly different task from doing it vice versa, as one normally would with a record. 

Coming away from a five-day recording session at Real World Studios near Bath, Peel says she sat with the files for more than half a year, not knowing what to do with them. She’s no stranger to producing, of course – her brilliant, Mercury Prize-nominated Fir Wave is just one example – but in this instance she says “it just felt so different,” trying to go from “an almost spiritual space where it was so much about freedom” to looking at the music on a screen. “I just couldn’t get my head around it,” she says, and that’s where Mike Lindsay came in.

For Peel, the Tunng frontman and one half of LUMP with Laura Marling, was a perfect fit for the task of guest producer (“somebody with an outside perspective, who hadn't been to a show, hadn’t been in the studio”), and Wang was fully on board from the very first bounce. 

“He sent two songs at first and we both heard them at the same time, because we were in Thailand together playing a show,” Peel recalls. “We put on our headphones and were like, ‘Oh my god, this is perfect. He’s picked out all these details, like hiccups and talking and laughter, all these things that felt real, whereas I would have been scrutinising everything critically and left all that stuff out.”

Those details are, ultimately, what gives The Endless Dance so much of its charm, besides the instrumental mastery of course. Wang’s percussion is so often dazzlingly creative, not least on “Awaken the Insects” where she pairs Chinese tongue twister babble with bamboo clapper rhythms so naggingly catchy it should come with a heart rate warning, while Peel’s fantastic synth work by now should need no introduction – the quality is guaranteed. 

Even better, it’s the sound of two people just getting started. “It’s a long-term relationship,” Wang says, laughing. “It’s not a one-night stand and then bye-bye. What we’re doing musically is building up.”

The King’s Place show. Making the album. The festival in Thailand. A recent show in Glasgow. It’s all adding to the pile of experience that Wang feels sure will take their headline show at the Barbican this autumn to “another level.” “We are still in the process of understanding each other a little bit more,” she says. “We’ve shared so many memories and been on all these journeys already, and all those memories are something we can carry forward to build the next memories in the future, and it’s a beautiful feeling.”

BEST FIT: Beibei, you’ve described working with Hannah as like yin and yang. People often think of yin and yang as binary opposites, but that’s not really the case, is it? 

BEIBEI WANG: Yin and yang is completely about energy. With Hannah, we both have yin and yang, and we can both can be yin or yang at any time. But if we are both yang at the same time, or both yin, it’s fine. 

To me, it’s really an improvisation, just like the first time we played together. It’s the feeling of how you interact with a sound world that you haven’t prepared for. It’s like a conversation. Like we only just met and we had a banquet of crazy food. It’s that kind of feeling to me. 

It’s a beautiful encounter, just two spirits, two energies. That’s why I said yin and yang, not just because it’s a Chinese philosophy. I totally felt that way with Hannah. When we are together, I don’t feel restricted. I don’t feel judged. Hannah is always encouraging me to be me, and that’s the most healthy relationship you can have with someone.

When I look at Hannah, I see a role model of how a woman can be so versatile. She’s a musician, a composer, a producer, a director – she’s a full spectrum of what an artist can be. And she’s so strong, so spicy, and she’s so beautiful too. I feel like I absorb so much knowledge and nutrition from knowing her.

HANNAH PEEL: Oh well! [laughs] If could have had you as a mother, I probably would have had a better upbringing!

I think Beibei summed it up well. You know, in this industry, people have all these different wants and intentions, and I feel like this is one of those rare projects where you meet someone and you just make music together for the love of it, for the fun. There are no restrictions. There’s no one saying “You can’t do this” or “We expect this of you.” It’s just making music as a tool to communicate, and to show that this kind of cross-cultural stance is human, entirely human, and nothing to do with politics or anything else beyond coming together and having a conversation.

I think that’s really important, and why I think the music’s turned out the way it has. It’s very rare that you get to go on stage and improvise, keep doing it, and then go and record it, and both experiences were so different. But the chance to just play with someone before you record is getting rarer and rarer. We’re doing everything in the box these days. Everything is done on the computer.

Beibei, you’ve also mentioned the Taoist philosophy of wu wei, which is, as I understand it, all about flow and intuition, letting the music come without forcing it. Did that approach encourage you to think of yourselves less as composers and more like participants?

WANG: Actually not at all [laughs]. Because I feel like I am still learning so much about my cultural background and all that knowledge and tradition. I didn’t learn it when I was growing up in China. I've only really discovered myself in that way since I moved to England.

After the King’s Place concert with Hannah, I realised that if you don’t force things and allow the different energies between two people to flow, you feel relaxed. It’s like having a friend come to your home. You just relax together and talk. But if there’s a journalist coming to interview you both, it’s a different mindset because you have all these questions to answer. When you have a task, you’re automatically thinking in a different way, like your mind is in fight mode. But when you’re peacefully sitting with that friend, having a cup of tea and chatting – about love, about loss, about the future – it can be so inspiring.

So, we were like that. We just had a conversation on stage. We didn’t know each other well, and I think the curiosity triggered us to want to know each other, and to want to push and pull. That’s when I started to think, oh, that’s like yin and yang, and that’s like wu wei. 

Wu wei doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. It means you’re not thinking about things as you do them. It means being open to perceive things and letting everything happen. So, after the King’s Place show, I thought I should do more research about it, to read more philosophy books, and start to dig into all that stuff, and that encouraged me to discover myself even more. So it actually happened the other way around. The music came first, and the philosophy afterwards.

In allowing the music to emerge, did you find yourselves having to fight the impulse to refine things that you weren't sure of?

PEEL: There’s definitely a part of us that has tried to stay away from the word ‘improvised’ when talking about the album, because it was more that we were experimenting, I think, trying out sounds and how things fit together. Doing that live in a room, if we made a mistake, it wasn’t a mistake it was just a change. But making a record, which is a thing that you show to the world and people buy, is a totally different experience, so songs were certainly refined and changed over time. 

When Mike got involved, the first two songs he worked on were “Wild Geese Arrive”, which is the first song on the album, and then “Tiger Sex”, and I love that he could be like, “Ah, I love this sound and I’m going to do this with it,” because he is so playful.

Once he’d gone through that process with all the songs, we had a couple of days at his studio in Margate where we sat down to look at everything and chop it back a bit so that the album could fit on a vinyl, and he had such an amazing energy. He dances a lot around the room. He never sits still in the studio, and it was so fun to witness and be a part of.

Is there anything you want to add to that Beibei?

WANG: Well, yeah, just because the name “Tiger Sex” is so funny. I recently gave the album to one of my composer friends who has a 9-year-old son who’s really obsessed with music. He couldn’t wait to open the vinyl, and his mum had to hide “Tiger Sex” from him. She was like, “You can listen, but you can’t see the name of the song.”

PEEL: Somebody sent me a message saying, “I didn’t know that tigers had sex at 126bpm.”

WANG: Yeah, I saw two tigers having sex at London Zoo once and it was really quick. All the kids there were like, “Mummy, what are they doing?”, and that stayed in my mind. So, when we were looking at the Chinese solar calendar and the activities that different animals do during different periods of the year, the memory of the tigers having sex seemed to connect with that philosophy.

BEST FIT: We’ll come back to the 24 solar terms in a bit, but first I wanted to talk about some of the other symbolic numbers that Beibei has talked about. Beibei, you said in an email that improvisation has “an internal logic where sounds generate, resist, and transform each other, like the Five Elements,” which are fire, earth, metal, water, wood. Could you talk a bit more about how you see improvisation within that framework?

BEIBEI WANG: Actually, at the beginning it wasn't that profound. Superficially, it was about the instruments I use. I have a lot of metal instruments, like gongs and lots of different types of cymbals, including some traditional Chinese symbols. I also use instruments made from wood, instruments made from clay and stone, and, as Hannah mentioned, I use water as an instrument too. So, in terms of thinking about elements, at first it was just about those instruments.

But in working with Hannah, and because I’ve never collaborated with anyone who works with electronics before, it really felt like an extension of the physical world. It felt like she could transform my metal sound into what the metal might sound like in space, or she could transform the water sound into some other element that might exist out there in the universe. It felt infinite, in that it was a transformation from reality into imagination, and I think that fits perfectly with the Five Elements philosophy, which, again, I only properly researched and learned about after playing with Hannah. 

So, the Five Elements idea is not really about the elements themselves, it’s about how they interact with each other. For example, if wood and fire meet, the interaction is burning and it’s going to trigger some kind of emotion or some other feeling or state. But then if you have other elements that join in, they’re going to change that interaction. It’s all about the relationships and connections between things, and that’s a perfect way to look at our compositions too. Because when we are putting two elements or materials together, how we perceive the organic feeling of that meeting changes how we push for the development of the music. So, again, it’s been such a nice journey for us to discover so much rich cultural context afterwards.

You also mentioned another Taoist idea of the bā yīn, the Eight Sounds. Can you talk more about how you see that philosophy in terms of your work with Hannah?

WANG: In traditional Chinese music they categorise instruments by what they are made of, and there are eight materials they use. Metal is jin, stone is shi, earth is tu. Ge means skin, which applies to a lot of drums. Then there’s silk, si, wood, mu, gourd, pao, and bamboo, which is zhu. On the song “Awaken the Insects” I use some traditional bamboo clappers. So I really felt like I was in dialogue with my Chinese identity and heritage, playing all these instruments on the record.

I liked what you said in your email about how the different materials carry these different energies and time. And I wondered, when you compose, how much are you listening to what the material itself naturally wants to do, rather than imposing your own will on it?

WANG: I think it comes down to the idea that the music is writing you rather than you are writing the music. It’s like there’s an invisible master holding your hand and saying, “Write this,” you know? You already had the music inside you, you just needed a way to get it out, to let it go. I feel like that with the music we made together. We didn’t compose it, it composed us, and that’s very connected with Taoism. We didn’t want to force anything. We wanted to just let the music flow, to let it be, and to just enjoy that in the moment.

Hannah, do you think of electronic instruments as materials with their own physical energies too?

HANNAH PEEL: Yeah, especially when I really got into working with a lot of analogue and vintage synths, which was around 2010 when I was playing and touring with John Foxx and the Maths. 

Working with John and Benge, I was sort of thrown into a pit of fire in terms of learning how to wield a bunch of old ‘60s and ‘70s synths that were half working or didn’t work in the way that I wanted them to, or sometimes at all, because they’d break while on tour. So, there was definitely a sense of those instruments having their own voices and their own worlds.

What I learned from working with Mike Lindsay, who I actually worked with on my very first record [2011’s The Broken Wave], was that when the synth sounds go a bit wonky, you don’t have to class that as a mistake. You can use that sound to build a different kind of sound world. For someone who had never made a record before, that was really important. I was like, “Wow, okay, so it doesn’t need to be perfect. And, actually, the nuances are the best bit.”

Going back to what Beibei was saying about combining elements, there were moments when she was, for example, bowing a small gong or a cymbal and then dipping that into water at the same time to give these otherworldly sounds, I felt like I could react to that instantly, and that kind of interplay was really fun. If she was doing something that sounded really metallic, I would make sure the synths were doing that as well, and vice versa.

Even though he was a really grumpy man, I always respected a lot of what Vangelis was saying a lot of the time about how synths and acoustic instruments are part of the same continuum of sound, and that it all comes down to vibration. I think that’s a lovely way to look at it. Maybe there is one already, but if not I think there should be a philosophy of synthesisers written down somewhere.

Coming back to the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar, what I understand is that the different terms are rooted in observing the tiny changes in the natural world. Do you feel like this project changed your attention to subtleties in everyday life?

PEEL: Yeah, certainly in the West, we don’t typically think of the seasons in such a detailed way. I think the detail of the solar calendar that Beibei is referencing is so full of magic. Like, this is when the insects awake, this is when the horses are in battle with the mantises, this is the time when the dogs make offerings to the beasts. I find it really inspiring. 

Again, it’s not something we set out to do. It just somehow emerged when we were going through the album tracks with Mike in Margate. For example, there was one song where Beibei said it sounded like grain raining down, even though it’s just the sound of brushes on her skin. It has this element of late spring, early summer to it, and so the song became “Grain Rain”. Towards the end of the record there’s a song called “Limit of Heat”, which corresponds to the point of the year where the heat has dried everything out. It’s when people are sweating and things are dying. And the song just seemed to sound like that.

WANG: It's because of the way you are as a composer. I feel like you can picture all these scenes in your mind, like some kind of film. I’ve explained the Chinese solar calendar thing to other musicians, but it didn’t work for them, not the way it worked for you.

PEEL: Really?

WANG: Yeah. I’ve talked to many people about it and no one reacted to it like you did, and I think that connects to your experience as composer. You’re always trying to picture a scene or a story or a memory.

For me, the solar calendar is a real memory because, growing up, my grandparents would have this calendar on their wall. Every day you would take a page and it would suggest activities that that particular day was good for, according to the solar terms. It was sort of a guide, and it stayed in my mind even though, back then, I didn’t find it particularly interesting. It was just a part of life, just a thing we did. I used to joke with my grandparents that it was so old-fashioned to believe in something like that. Like, it’s not scientific, just forget about it. 

It’s so funny that now I think the reverse. With this music, it’s completely modern and contemporary, but it still has that connection to Taoism. Taoists never think that nature is separate from us. The animals are just like us. They date, they mate, they do all these activities that most of us don’t pay any attention to. We don’t have any dialogue with them. They have their own communities. Maybe they even have their own countries, their own politics. Maybe the ants are fighting with the elephants, you never know. We’re so separated from nature, so concentrated on our human societies, but we’re just one species on the planet. 

While I’m at it, what is time? I feel like time is a concept invented by humans. Animals perceive time differently, in a really natural, organic way. We’re all the same, so why don’t we join them?

I feel like the album title, The Endless Dance, sort of relates to that kind of cyclical cosmology, where every ending contains a seed of renewal. Does that ring true for you?

PEEL: Yeah, absolutely. The life cycle, the mortality that we live through, is all a part of it. 

This record was so fun to make so it made sense to have the word “dance” in the title, because it felt like a kind of game. There was all this to-and-fro, this passage of love and loss, and how each year the same thing happens all over again. I think “endless” can be interpreted in different way, but it felt to us that it was a playful, fun thing.

I think one of the beautiful things about making this record is that there’ve been no expectations. We’ve been allowed all this space and time to just see where our collaboration takes us. There was no commercial plan or input, so I feel very lucky to have got to this stage. Because when you’re starting out in music, you’re in a much more difficult position. This industry can be so crazy.

When did things start to change for you, Hannah, in terms of realising you could have more freedom and just do what you wanted?

PEEL: I think it was Fir Wave, because it did really well. But the thing about that album is that it was never really meant to be released. It was a record that was written for a library, and I loved that it belonged to that story. I didn’t think I’d ever put it out, but when we made the decision to do it, it was a bit like this project in that it was a lot of fun. 

Fir Wave was completely different from what I’d done before, but it was really my kind of music. So the fact that it was nominated for the Mercury Prize and did so well was just such a blessing. It taught me that, as an artist, I wasn’t restricted.

The next record after that was The Unfolding, with the Paraorchestra, which was a completely different sound but still addressed the same kinds of things that Fir Wave did. It was still concerned with life cycles, but it was more about the body and how we are all the same. We come from the same cells, the same earth, and it’s that earth we’ll go back to, and the cycle goes on. So it's interesting that a similar theme has come out in The Endless Dance as well. 

It wasn’t intentional, but obviously that's where my philosophy sits.

BEST FIT: You two met working on the NEON project with Manchester Collective. Given the topic you’ve chosen, I wondered if you were engaging with the visual histories of neon cities in the making of this album too? Or were you thinking more of the parallels between technology and cultural loss and the loss of biodiversity in the natural world?

HANNAH PEEL: Absolutely, yeah. Spot on. 

When I was writing the piece for Manchester Collective, they had already done a recording of Steve Reich’s “Sextet” for the show, so the brief was something that would fit alongside Steve Reich. He’s from New York so I thought about how, whenever I’ve been to New York, I’ve always thought it was so beautiful to see the city and all these iconic locations at night, especially in the rain, and that started me thinking about all the lights and the neon imagery. 

Then I found an amazing little documentary about this old guy in Japan working in a factory making neon lights, and he was the only one left on the floor. He was talking about how it’s such a specific artform that’s dying out, and I loved that he said it was made with "touch, breath, and a spark,” and I felt like that was very key to what we’re doing. I think the beauty of what Beibei does is the touch and breath and acoustic side of things, and the technology comes from my side, I guess. 

I think the first gig we put together had the description of evoking places we’d never been to, or imagined places, a bit like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where things get quite surreal. Like, maybe there are staircases coming out of the ground and reaching all the way up the clouds where the flamingos live. So I think there’s definitely an element of us joining together on The Endless Dance to create a different type of place, somewhere that the music can sit.

Isn’t it amazing, how you can create something out of sound and still feel like you’re transported somewhere else? I think that’s one of the beauties of our brains and how we listen to music, that we can evoke memories of places and geographies that we may not ever have been to.

Beibei, is there a particular song on the album where you can really picture a certain place?

BEIBEI WANG: I think all the pieces do that. They all have a very different feeling, I think. They’re all stimulating in a different way. But maybe I can pick out “Awaken the Insects”, because it’s so funny and so provincial in a way, and because it’s a song where I feel I was so encouraged by Hannah. 

I remember we were kind of joking around. It was nighttime and we’d been working, so we were a little bit tired, a little bit out of energy, but then I picked up the bamboo clappers and started to play a rhythm that felt really fun and so I kept it going. Then I brought my really crap rapping skills in, just naturally remembering this Chinese tongue twister I had learned when I was five, which is really just some nonsense about eating a grapefruit.

Later I found another tongue twister that was a bit more music related, about a mute carrying a trumpet and a monk carrying some fish who meet and have a big fight, but everyone gets confused because the Chinese words for fish, monk, trumpet, and mute all sound very similar. 

It’s a really funny story so I tried to blend that together with the grapefruit tongue twister, and Mike did a really cool cut between them. Even though he had no idea what I was saying he made the cut perfectly, and we added a delay effect too so it became even funnier. 

It's so brilliantly done. It was the first song I heard from the record and immediately thought, ‘I have to know more about this project.’

WANG: It’s another reason why Hannah was the perfect collaborator for this project, because she has a vision. To me, in my head, what I was doing was so dated, nothing cool and sexy, but in Hannah’s eyes it became so interesting. Her electronic work, I think, really extended my earthy, provincial thing to a whole other, futuristic sounding world I’d never heard before.

I love that we have these different perspectives, these different ways of seeing things. There was a whole chemistry happening that I think tells us everything about how people need to come together and appreciate their differences, because it could lead to something so creative – and, really, that’s the only way we can all live together healthily and happily. 

PEEL: Yeah, spot on. Very important at the moment especially.

BEST FIT: Hannah, you’ve described this album as “a kind of subconscious influence” on The Endless Dance. What is about this record that has stayed with you over the years?

HANNAH PEEL: I think somebody recommended it and the only way I could hear it was on YouTube. You couldn't get it at the time on anything else. It wasn't on vinyl for a long time until they finally reissued it a few years ago.

I think what’s so beautiful about Through the Looking Glass is that it’s this strange, ambient record that has so much freedom to it. It wasn't recorded to click and it used instruments in ways that, in the ‘80s, were really unusual because everyone was so electronic focused at the time. Bells, gong, marimba, glass Coca-Cola bottles. 

I love the title too, because it has this whole other surrealist, very imaginative side to it. It’s really just very unusual. Do you know that record, Beibei? I’m just realising now that we’ve not actually spoken about it all.

WANG: I don’t know it, but I did go to see Midori in concert at Kings Place, because you texted me that you really loved her work and that I had to go. I took my dad with me and he was completely blown away. 

It was so striking for me to watch as she’s such an interesting percussionist and artist. It really opened my mind to new possibilities within my field as well, because she was using all this silent film footage from the Second World War in Japan and you could still really feel the brutality of war, the violence and the loudness, through her playing. 

PEEL: I get the sense that she’s a bit like a Laurie Anderson type person. She experiments all the time but it’s not necessarily just about the music, it’s about all these philosophies and ideas around it. I think she did a project recently with monks. I love the way she thinks creatively about the connection between humans and nature. I think it’s really important. 

But, yeah, going back to Through the Looking Glass, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’d love to this kind of thing.’ That must have been around 2015 or 2016, so that idea kind of simmered away for a good six or seven years before meeting Beibei.

I like what you said about how you perceive Midori's work. It’s not just an aesthetic, she seems to really deeply engage with her sources to create something unique and new. And she did it in just three days. You made The Endless Dance in five days, right?

HANNAH PEEL: Yeah, five days of recording and then a lot of editing, but I think the essence is similar. 

Another musician I really love who draws from all these different cross-cultural influences is a Kenyan guy called KMRU, who I think is based in Berlin. I love the way his music sounds like it’s from all these different places, and the way that he writes certain phrases that remind you of those places without it being obvious.

I think that’s certainly what Beibei and I have tried to do. Maybe the worst thing people could write about The Endless Dance would be to call it a fusion or a mix of East and West, because I don’t think it is. I think it’s something entirely different. Anything else just wouldn’t make sense to us.

BEST FIT: Let’s move on to your final reference point, the Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita and her epic, narrative embroideries partly inspired by Balinese folklore. Can you tell me how you first came across her work? 

HANNAH PEEL: She had a big exhibition at the Barbican and I just thought it was utterly incredible. Huge embroideries with all these beautiful earth tones and playful forms that feel like living textures, not craft as an object but an atmosphere.

I think because we were making this record already at the time, I was really looking out for artistic interpretations that aligned with what we were doing, in terms of thinking about what we could do for an album cover and how we could express the ideas of the music in an image. I’d already thought about the fact that we both have long hair and that we could plait them together to create this lovely combination of Irish and Chinese hair, and in that exhibition of Citra Sasmita’s, she had a whole circle of braided hair that sort of floated down from the ceiling, and it felt really powerful.

A lot of her embroidery is kind of overtly sexual, too. It has a rawness to it, and it’s very much about what she has to say about the female body and how it’s going forward politically as well as in a historical context. I thought it was so fascinating so I sent it to Beibei, and even to Mike as a way of expressing what kind of vibe we wanted. Fiery and spicy, as you say Beibei! And, weirdly, Mike had been to see the same exhibition with his wife a few days before, so it was like it was meant to be.

Another one of the things I liked about her work is that a lot of it has to do with ancestral memory and rituals. When we were doing the live gigs – certainly by the second show, in Glasgow – we’d found a couple of grooves that we really liked because they expressed an almost ritualistic, pagan side on stage, which was super interesting. It really evoked a lot of power, I think, so it felt like a really nice place to sit in, creatively, for a while. 

That’s certainly where our heads had gone to by the time we went to Real World to make the album. And I think Citra Sasmita sums it all up in a very beautiful visual way. And the fact that it’s all cross-stitch is insane. The time it takes to make that kind of embroidery with your hands… I mean, they’re massive! They span a whole room.

I wish I’d seen it! Beibei, how did you respond to the pictures that Hannah was sending you? 

BEIBEI WANG: I was amazed. I especially loved the braided hair. It felt very human, and very historical also. Hannah is so quick with her references and she has all this knowledge, so working with her has been like learning art history in a way. It felt perfect, really. We’re both women and we both have something to say about what women as artists can be, so it was a good fit.

Do you think that has fundamentally changed the way you're going to work in the future? 

WANG: Absolutely! Now I'm thinking like an artist, whereas before I was ‘just’ a musician. I used to only hear music but now I feel like I see things more. I see people’s stories and their struggles in the music a lot more than before, so this whole process has really pushed me in the direction of an artist and I’m really, really enjoying that. 

PEEL: I think you're very natural in that way, Beibei. 

WANG: [laughs] Every day she’s like, “Beibei, you have this, please carry on,” and that’s the beauty of having someone in your life who always says that they believe you, they encourage you, and then you just get brainwashed by that, and I’m so grateful to have that in Hannah.