Hania Rani

Hailing from Poland, this neo-classical pianist and composer fuses a fragile, introspective, and restrained keyboard technique with contemporary studio methods to conjure notions of identity, domesticity, and terrain. She entered the world in 1990 in Gdańsk, the northern port city whose watery surroundings seem to echo in the calm textures of her work. Classical studies began at the Feliks Nowowiejski music school in her birthplace, where she formed a close bond with cellist Dobrawa Czocher. She later attended Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, supplementing rigorous practice with side explorations of jazz and electronica. After the 2015 collaborative release Biała Flaga with Czocher, she relocated to Reykjavik to develop and capture solo pieces. Manchester-based Gondwana Records founder Matthew Halsall, struck by the resulting demos, agreed to release her first solo album, Esja, in 2019. The project earned five Fryderyk nominations in Poland and prompted early discussion of its planned 2020 successor, Home.

She was given the name Hanna Raniszewska at birth, the daughter of a physician and an architect. Although no relatives pursued music professionally, violin, guitar, and trumpet sounds regularly filled the household during her childhood. At six she began picking out lullabies on a piano her parents had purchased; by ten she was devoting eight hours daily to the keyboard, focusing intently on national figure Chopin. While enrolled at the Warsaw conservatory she adopted a more exploratory stance, and after transferring to Berlin for additional studies she cultivated a fixation on sound capture, influenced by local figures including Nils Frahm.

Sessions begun in Reykjavik in 2017 supplied the core material for the 2019 solo debut Esja. Titled after the mountain range lying roughly ten kilometers beyond the Icelandic capital, the entirely instrumental set was tracked with microphones positioned near the piano to register subtle mechanical noises such as pedal creaks. Drawing equally from the island’s climate and geography, the album brought Rani a Sanki award from Polish journalists, who cited her among the nation’s most compelling emerging artists; tours through the U.K., Denmark, the Netherlands, and Japan followed. Her music also featured that year in Piotr Domalewski’s film I Never Cry, and in early 2020 she supplied cues for Michał Zdunik’s staging of the Henrik Ibsen play Nora. By then Home, the anticipated successor to Esja, had already been completed. Largely tracked in Poland with drummer Wojtek Warmijak and bassist Ziemowit Klimek appearing on select tracks, the record marked Rani’s first recorded vocals, notably on the lead single “Leaving.”