We travel to Gdansk in this latest episode of Composing Myself for a chat with Polish composer Hania Rani. During the course of this wonderful forty-five minute conversation with Wise Music CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham we learn about Hania’s early love for Beethoven’s sonatas and the struggle of having to choose between Britney and J-Lo, her accidental, into-the-frying-pan introduction to singing, her work on the posthumous music of Polish rock musician and composer Grzegorz Ciechowski, and why it’s not music but “all the other things” that inspire her. Enchanting, enlightening stuff.

https://haniarani.com/

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Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she has her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works.

Her debut album ‘Esja’, a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces, on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empikchain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sankiaward for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists.

Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales".

Her follow-up album, the expansive, cinematic, ‘Home’, was released on May 15th and finds Rani expanding her range: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorekin Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikoreyin Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds). For Rani, Home, is very much a continuation of the work she started on Esja, “the completion of the sentence” as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination.

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