WOW Sounds: Hania Rani

Bridging pop music with classical music and psychedelia with minimalism, the multifaceted award-winning musician Hania Rani is coming to WOW Athens 2024 and the Stavros Niarchos Hall on Monday, April 8, at 21:00.

Hania Rani started studying classical piano at the age of 7. Now, at 33, she is a well-rounded artist, composing, orchestrating and producing her albums. The Polish pianist, composer and performer, whose real name is Hanna Raniszewska, credits this development, in part, to her impatience.

After studying classical piano in Gdansk and at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, she went on to live in Berlin where she met artists from several different parts of the world, ranging from jazz performers to electronic music producers, who helped her broaden the musical boundaries of her original compositions. Since then, Rani has recorded even in studios in Iceland, in collaboration with local composers, creating minimalist tracks with vocal parts that sound dreamy and otherworldly.

Over the past few years, Rani's career has been evolving along two seemingly incompatible paths. On the one hand, she recorded a duet album with cellist Dobrawa Czocher for the German label Deutsche Grammophon, and on the other hand, she composed a minimalist contemporary classical soundtrack for the documentary On Giacometti about the life of subversive Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. At the same time, she also worked on pop music, drawing inspiration from psychedelic bands such as the Pink Floyd, whose music she loves as much as Bach, Mozart and Chopin's compositions.

As a result, in her live performances she manages to combine classical and pop music, firmly believing that one genre ideally accompanies the other. "This was a key to my perception of music and art: everything can easily intertwine, and collate together; coexist," she notes.

Hania Rani's music resembles the movement of waves in the ocean, at times setting listeners adrift on a highly emotional landscape and at other times putting them in a deeply meditative state. Her music has attracted - and continues to attract and inspire - so many young listeners because her compositions are more emotional than intellectual, more rhythmic than atonic, creating a musical world in which potential listeners drift along in several different directions, much like waves in an ocean of sound.