(2021) Hania Rani - Music for Film and Theatre


Review:
Last year the Warsaw-born, Berlin-based composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Hania Rani released Home, an album that introduced electronic and vocal elements to her otherwise minimal piano compositions. Citing James Blake and Nils Frahm, Rani brought a poppy but also more experimental influence into her music, with whiffs of Blake-ean bass wobbles sneaking into the final minute of the title track. Incorporating these newfound styles propelled Rani to a larger audience (she was profiled by Mark Coles for BBC Radio 4, for example), and on her latest LP, Music for Film and Theatre, Rani continues to build on these sounds, embroidering her piano and string tapestries with touches of electronic decay and haunted vocal lines. The lion’s share of the music is taken from two films. The first is Aleksandra Potoczek’s xABo: Father Boniecki, a documentary about an aging and outspoken Polish priest whose advocacy work for the LGBTQ+ community has left him ostracized from his country and church. These three songs are the most varied on the record, showcasing Rani’s versatility as a composer. We start with the electronic soundscape and filtered cries of “Prayer,” move through the hushed piano reverence of “In Between” and end with “Journey,” our first taste of Rani’s voice, filtered and swirling across the plucked piano and almost tactile string section that pulses beneath. The second part of the record is taken from I Never Cry, directed by Piotr Domalewski. The film, a sort of Polish As I Lay Dying, follows a heavy-drinking and hard-living 17-year-old who travels to Ireland to retrieve the body of her migrant father. While the movie does have some lighthearted moments (at one point the protagonist Ola smashes the license plate of a car that cut her off in the middle of receiving driving lessons), the humor is left out of Rani’s score. Almost entirely composed on piano, this section of the record feels like short, pointed vignettes of indelible heartbreak with only faint hope in the twinkling keys on “The Beach” or Rani’s vocal rounds on “At the Hospital.” This suite of songs comes to a climax with “The Locker Room” as the piano line seems to collapse into the entropy of the feedback swelling beneath it. The final set of songs are all one-offs that either never made it into final scores or are taken from Rani’s theatre work. These are the densest (and longest) songs on the record. “Wildfires,” for example, trades Rani’s usual melancholy for a fever pitch of dueting strings and piano where the vibrato on the violin feels almost flammable. “Ghosts” achieves a similar effect, as the cello and violin vie for attention. That the most opulent songs end the record makes sense. Although all of the tracks here are pulled from disparate places, Rani brings them together with a dramatic sense of unity. Music for Film and Theatre feels like it unfolds across three acts: we are eased in with xAbo: Father Boniecki, hooked by the melodrama from I Never Cry and end with these final fireworks. Each of the songs on this record is individually beautiful, but Rani’s clever sequencing makes them feel like a sum much larger than the component parts. Brought together, something like a play emerges from Rani’s delicate piano and string melodies and the flourishes of voice and electronic warping she applies to this record’s 12 songs.





Track Listing:
1.Prayer 03:31
2.In Between 03:10
3.Journey 04:26
4.Trip to Ireland 01:51
5.The Beach 02:56
6.The Locker Room 02:26
7.At the Hospital 01:03
8.Waiting 01:40
9.Wildfires 05:15
10.Ghosts 03:03
11.Soleil Pâle 03:53
12.Nora 05:15


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical
Country: Poland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits