Esja Hania Rani

• 1 Rani: Eden 04:55
• 2 Rani: Sun 05:23
• 3 Rani: Hawaii Oslo 04:16
• 4 Rani: Pour trois 03:14
• 5 Rani: Biesy 04:16
• 6 Rani: Luka 05:07
• 7 Rani: Glass 04:31
• 8 Rani: Today It Came 02:34
• 9 Rani: Esja 04:21
• 10 Rani: Now, Run 06:32
• Total Runtime 45:09

Info for Esja

The pianist's first album - melodic, harmonious and mesmerising. “I think I am the same as an artist and as a person. Music is my way of communication and I see the art, the music as a whole thing, with no borders, divisions, or even genres.”

Hania Raniis a pianist, composer and musician who splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. She has written for strings, piano, voice and electronics and has collaborated with the likes of Christian Löffler, Dobrawa Czocher and Hior Chronik, and released an album with her Polish group tęskno last year. She has performed at some of the most prestigious venues in Europe - from the National Philharmony in Warsaw, to Funkhaus in Berlin, to The Roundhouse in London (where she made her debut at the Gondwana 10thanniversary festival last October) and at festivals such as Open’er, Scope Festival and Eurosonic. Her compositions for solo piano were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, and her desire to interpret its sound and harmonic possibilities in their entirety and in her own way.

Esja is her debut solo album and for Rani it is her first, real, personal statement as an artist. “No hiding behind the "collaborations" or "projects" anymore. For the very first time, finally - just me, as I am”.

Recorded at Rani’s apartment in Warsaw (the piano room has a beautiful reverb and the space has become part art studio and part sound laboratory for Rani) and at her friend Bergur Þórisson’sstudio in Reykjavik, Esja is a series of beautiful melodic vignettes. Sensual, sensitive, rhythmic, atmospheric, free but harmonious, beguiling and hypnotic, collectively they project a sense of unlimited space and time.

Originally, Rani hadn’t planned to release a solo piano album at all. “I would like to be considered first of all as a composer of music - so not being limited to any instrument or voice or whatever. The solo album came when I went to Reykjavik, where I wrote some new songs instantly while in the studio, so they were almost improvised compositions. It was then that I decided to release an unadorned solo piano album - telling a lot about my musical roots, which are definitely in this instrument. But it’s also just a small prelude of all the music that I want to share in the future”.

Rani grew up in Gdansk with her parents (a doctor and architect) and surrounded by music and films. Initially inspired to study classical music, she was introduced to jazz and electronics at music school, widening her interests and as she puts it, “mixing Chopin & Schostakovitch with Dave Brubeck and Moderat”.Other inspirations include composers such as Max Richter, Esbjorn Svensson, Miles Davis, Nils Frahm, Murcof, Portico Quartet, Radiohead and even The Beatles.“It’s what connects all these artists that inspires me, their special approach to music and sound. For me they have big hearts and huge minds.”

But Rani’s inspirations aren’t just musical, she has drawn inspiration from places she has lived and visited. “It’s about the feeling, the general atmosphere, sometimes about memories. Moving to Berlin (where you have the freedom to be yourself), exploring Iceland and the wild mountains in Bieszczady, South-East Poland, all changed me as a person, so I guess, also affected me as an artist.” And inspiration comes too from visual arts. Her father was an architect and the arts remain hugely important to Rani. “Ifind that what really inspires my music is not the music, but all the other things. I take inspiration for the form of my own pieces from architecture and design. Then I translate this "foreign" language, to my own music and the outcome is way more interesting for me than just getting it from the music.

Indeed, for Rani it is often an image or a colour that comes first, what she calls a sound image. “I can really feel the colours, the mood - just like with photography. If the image is strong enough, sounds come along very quickly, trying to build the right image stuck in my head. The music fills the space, the music brings the new worlds, new spaces. One such inspiration was the collage artist Anthony Zinonos whose artwork adorns the cover of Esja and whose work Hania first found when she was working on the music that would become this album.“I really like the mix of colours and minimalistic style which perfectly describe me as a person and as an artist. I am really in love with his sense of humour and rare ability to match pure shapes with energetic colours and mood”

Beautifully sculpted, Esja opens with the gorgeous Eden,which features a chorus full of warmth and grace. Sun is inspired by the sensation of the warmth of the sun, but also by the feeling of being small in the face of the universe. Hawaii Oslotakes its name from the film of the same name, but is inspired by the contrast of mood and location, always changing as you listen. Biesyis named for the Bieszczady Mountains and a memory of driving in Bieszczady'sforests and twisted roads with friends. The wistful, charming, Luka, is a love song written for someone who affected Rani’s music profoundly. The shimmering Glassis named for its fragility, but also for its many colours, like glass caught in the light. Today it Cameis the only song from the album recorded on a grand piano (belonging to Olafur Arnalds in his studio in Reykjavik). Inspired by the piano, Rani wrote a simple, beautiful tune, and when asked what the song was, she replied “it came today" and that became the title of a memorable piece. Finally, Esjais the named by the mountain in south-west Iceland (which can be seen from almost everywhere in Reykjavik) and because of constant changes to the weather there, it always looks different. It therefore became the perfect title for one of her favourite pieces, one that sounds different every time she performs it. And in turn it became the perfect title for her debut album. A powerful, entrancing statement that offers new delights and new insights on every listen and announces Hani Rani as a major new artist.

Hania Rani

Hania Rani
Hania’s music grabs you — its gravitational pull sucks you into a hypnotic trance, regardless of your will. Pianist, composer, and vocalist, she has emerged as a genre-blending nonconformist who nevertheless has made a name for herself interweaving classical, jazz, and electronic influences. Born in 1990 in Gdańsk, Poland—a city renowned for the Solidarity resistance movement, the first independent labor union in the Eastern Bloc active throughout the 1980s — Hania began playing the piano at age seven. She eventually trained as a classical pianist in Warsaw and later pursued studies in Berlin, where she began to explore electronic music. Recently, she has settled in London.

Rani is a quiet star — more interested in connection than fame or spectacle - and constantly seeks the new in her work, challenging herself and her audience in an active process or renewal and regeneration. It’s a driving quality that she has brought to bear on a remarkably diverse catalogue, beginning with 2015’s Biała Flaga, released with her friend, cellist Dobrawa Czocher, and reissued by Deutsche Grammophon in 2021. She’s since progressed swiftly through a series encompassing solo piano albums like 2019’s Esja, 2023’s more electronically inclined Ghosts, not to mention film and theatre scores, art installations, even her first piano concerto. It is this restlessness that a decade after her artistic debut, keeps driving her to greater heights. “I guess I’m quite single minded,” she laughs. “Often I’m not ultimately happy and that allows me to think, ‘This time I’ll be better’.”

A self-confessed latecomer to writing and recording her own compositions, Rani was born in 1990 to an architect father and doctor mother, growing up in a house filled with music. Her earliest memories include its presence, and it was only when she began spending more time at her friends that she began to understand how the sounds of neither her father’s Beatles, Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens LPs, nor her mother’s classical collection, were a constant feature in other families’ homes. Enrolling, aged seven, at music school, she soon found herself exposed not only to the intense training demanded by classical music– she could read and write music almost as soon as words – but also, slowly but surely, to a further range of styles across the spectrum.

Still, the institution’s focus was on performance, and the idea she might nurture her own creativity – especially as a Pole, even more so as a female – rarely crossed her mind. Though she witnessed other musicians covering a gamut of different genres, sometimes even arranging their music – especially after she moved on to Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin University – she continued to restrict herself to collaboration. For a time she was half of Poland’s respected alternative pop duo, Tęskno, releasing an album, Mi, in 2018, but even Biała Flaga, released when she was 25, had contained just a smattering of hers and Czocher’s own short compositions. Instead it was primarily concerned with their rearrangements of Polish rock star Grzegorz Ciechowski.

It was during the second half of the 2010s that Rani moved to Berlin to continue her studies at Hanns Eisler Hochschule Für Musik where she really developed as a composer, taking counter-point and contemporary music classes as well as studying acoustics and collaborating with modern opera directors and theatre directors and poets. It was also in Berlin where Rani would start to explore electronic music and experience and a growing and immense feeling of freedom, expanding what felt possible as a pianist and performer. She also made friends with an Icelandic opera singer, Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir, who welcomed her into a likeminded circle of her island homeland’s musicians. On her first visit to the country, too, Rani was introduced to Bergur Þórisson, one half of Hugar and a collaborator with Ólafur Arnalds who was just beginning to work with Björk. He invited her to return to record pieces she’d written for piano, though even she didn’t consider them especially worthy of further exposure afterwards, at least not outside her native country.

In fact, having returned to Warsaw following the conclusion of her studies, these pieces were merely an afterthought when she decided to reach out beyond Polish borders. By now, her main focus was on the sketches she’d prepared for what would turn out to be the foundation of her second album, Home. Gondwana Records, chosen as home to Portico Quartet, one of her favourite acts – and now Rani’s label – had ideas of their own, however. Just days after she’d sent both collections, they invited her to London, where they persuaded her to release Esja. This proved fortuitous, with its palliative tranquility a welcome counterpoint to the pandemic’s menacing uncertainty less than a year later. Soon she was captivating audiences trapped in households across the world, while lockdown also provided the chance to complete Home, which, in contrast to Esja, featured vocals and strings as well as additional contributions from bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak.

Released in late spring, 2020, this second solo album, like her first, picked up awards in her homeland as well as international acclaim, but Rani was far from content to rest on her laurels. Passionate about the visual arts including architecture, photography and of course cinema, she also composed scores for Piotr Domalewski’s film, 2020’s I Never Cry, and a play, Nora, directed by Michał Zdunik, with pieces for both included on 2021’s Music For Film And Theatre alongside other examples of her scoring work. That year, however, had already started with a remix exchange between Rani and Portico Quartet, and she’d also been invited to contribute to the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, releasing Live From Studio S2 on Piano Day. The enchanting, 25-minute performance – recorded and filmed in monochrome by a team of two in one of Polish Radio’s most iconic studios – has since amassed well over seven million views.

Even this wasn’t enough to satisfy Rani’s curiosity and passion, with Inner Symphonies, her second album with Dobrawa Czocher, released by Deutsche Grammophon in October, 2021. “My teacher’s room at music school was full of vinyl with the famous ‘Yellow Label’”, she marvels. “It felt like a dream come true.” If, furthermore, this collection, made up this time of their own compositions, only encouraged interest from film and TV, so did her soundtrack for 2022’s Venice – Infinitely Avant-Garde, not to mention On Giacometti, an album of piano music written for 2023’s The Giacomettis. In addition, she worked on her first production for Amazon, 2023’s The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, starring Sigourney Weaver, which, after receiving eight nominations at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, picked up four prizes, including Best Miniseries.

That year, too, Rani finally set out on tour again across Europe and North America, as well as finishing Ghosts, her most ambitious work to date, between Warsaw and Berlin. Released in October 2023, it was dominated by synths, featured her acrobatic voice yet more prominently, and its dismissal of any lingering belief she was merely another ‘New Classical’ composer was heralded by ‘Hello’s sprightly yet ethereal pop. Besides, with vocals from Patrick Watson on ‘Dancing With Ghosts’, the reappearance of bassist and Moog player Klimek, ‘Whispering House’ written and recorded with Ólafur Arnalds, and Portico Quartet’s Duncan Bellamy contributing loops, Ghosts introduced her to a whole new audience who welcomed these widening horizons.

Soon, having improbably provided music for ITV’s coverage of the English football team, she was on the road once more, headlining shows from London’s Somerset House to San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Meanwhile, visitors to Zodiak, the Warsaw Architecture Pavilion, could enjoy Room For Listening, a sound and spatial art installation, designed with architecture studio Zmir, in which an hour long composition is looped and streamed through 25 speakers. Rani then rounded off 2024 with a document of her live shows, recorded at the Polish Radio studios where she’d filmed Live At Studio S2, this time with an additional string ensemble. Now she occupied S1, its concert studio, afterwards providing the striking photos making up Nostalgia’s artwork as well as liner notes illuminating stories behind the music and her fascination with the space itself.

Confirming Rani’s eagerness to explore a myriad of musical avenues, 2025 will see the release by Decca of her piano concerto, Non Fiction. Commissioned in its original form by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, it was initially inspired by music written in the Warsaw ghetto by child prodigy pianist and composer Josima Feldschuh, who died in 1943, aged 13, while in hiding from transportations to Treblinka’s extermination camp. Moved by the girl's story Rani choose to examine it through the lens of modern horrors: the invasion of Ukraine and genocide in Gaza, and how closely we can 'observe' and 'hear' them through modern media. In doing this Rani aims to examine the constant coexistence of harmony and disorder creating a sonic metaphor for the survival of the human spirit when faced by the violence and uses the emotional value of sound to make these somehow distant conflicts more relatable to us on a human level. First performed in spring 2023, the expanded and reorchestrated concerto has now been recorded at Abbey Road Studios with The Manchester Collective, led by violinist Rakhi Singh, conducted by Hugh Brunt – Co-Artistic Director and Co-Principal Conductor, alongside Robert Ames, of the London Contemporary Orchestra – and featuring the remarkable individual voices of Portico Quartet saxophonist Jack Wyllie and renowned percussionist Valentina Magaletti. Non Fiction will be released on Decca Records on November 14 and will receive its premier performances at the Barbican Centre London on November 25 and 26, 2025.

In addition, Rani continues to write for films, including the adaptation, starring Glenn Close, of Tove Janssen’s The Summer Book, and Sentimental Value, directed by the Academy Award-nominated Joachim Trier and winner of this year’s Grand Prix at Cannes. In addition recent solo shows took Rani to Japan and Australia including Sydney Opera House and she toured her Ghosts album in its entirety with an eight-piece international ensemble – including her old friends, Klimek and Czocher – on a tour stopping in some of Europe’s most prestigious concert venues including sold-out shows at Berlin Philharmonie, Salle Pleyel in Paris and the Barbican in London. In this mass of activity, then, there is perhaps no better illustration of her compelling urge to explore, research and dissect her work – whether orchestral, electronic or piano, vocal or instrumental, alone or collaborative – nor, more importantly, her endless determination to “be better” and see “the beauty in things”. Music moves spirit, after all. As Rani observes, “probably the only stable part of my career is change. To have the opportunity to switch from touring to piano concerto, from piano concerto to pop, that’s the way ahead for me...”

Booklet for Esja