Hannah Schneider releases glorious new solo album ‘Ocean Letters’
From the beginning of her career, Hannah Schneider has established herself as a unique musician on the Danish scene. With her love of strong melodies and well crafted lyrics, she constantly treads new artistic paths, carrying the weight of contemplation as a companion.
On her new album Ocean Letters, the classic piano composition and the evocative electronic elements form a seamless kinship and create a picture-saturated tale of time.
Ocean Letters is Hannah Schneider’s first solo album in 7 years. Behind her, she has 3 highly acclaimed solo albums in her own name, while in recent years she has been busy in the electronic duo AyOwA, and the performance project Philip I Schneider.
Hannah has been nominated for several Danish music awards and has performed all over Europe, the UK and the US with her captivating solo performances, where she live samples, loops and creates playful soundscapes on stage. In addition, her voice has appeared in several films and TV series, including the national DR TV series Ride Upon The Storm.
With Ocean Letters, she seeks out new landscapes again. The songs create an intimate connection between the neoclassical and the modern, the near and the universal, and emphasize her cinematic, evocative expression with strength and a human humility.
The pandemic as a new worldwide condition became the beginning of the new songs. The album is inspired by the book Havbrevene (The Sea Letters) by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen – an exchange of letters between the sister oceans the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean who write together about life in the sea and on earth.
Central to the songs are the piano and Hannah’s spherical and evocative vocals, while the productions create budding hopes with flickering electronic elements. And while it’s still the strong melodies that are the focal point for Hannah Schneider, the record marks a new sonic path, with a cinematic sound that creates strong images in the listener’s mind.
After the years in the internationally recognized duo AyOwA, where Hannah has written and sung in Danish, she again wanted to write in English with the new songs. But the way of writing – in more direct, minimalist lines, which come from the spoken language has stuck with her ever since.
“You write in a different way in your mother tongue. And even though my father was American and I grew up with English as my second language, I had to go around my mother tongue to find my own way in the English lyrics”.
The first single from the album We Will Be The Only Sound in the World, was released in November 2021, and has its “sister story” in the focus track The World’s Gone Still Now. Both songs tell of a world in silence:
We Will Be The Only Sound In The World opens on an austere, elegant piano topped by Hannah’s deliciously haunting voice, crystalline yet ethereal at the same time. It’s one of those mystical voices with the power of summoning up the past, present, and future” popoff.us / Medium
The mysteries of nature and the oceans have inspired all the new songs, and on the second single Mirror Sphere, the great tale takes the perspective of an amoeba :
“I wrote those songs in the middle of the heaviest time of the pandemic. All background noise was gone. It felt like it was a crucial moment in history – almost as if it was the end of it all. I came to think of the earth’s long history, and that it all happens over millions of years – all the way back from the time the amoebas decided to go up on land, and became animals and humans. We are just part of the long haul, and in a way that’s a consolation! ”
“Starting our week off right, Hannah Schneider pours her rich vocals and twinkling melody into the symphonic track, “Mirror Sphere”. While the minimalist production lays the bare bones of the song, it is Hannah’s vulnerability that fleshes out the story” Wonderland Magazine
The last single forerunner of the album It’s The Season also takes its starting point in time. It’s a summer single to the melancholy sleepless state of bright evenings, carried by acoustic piano and with Jacob Bellens, Goss and Josephine Philip singing background vocals.
Hannah Schneider has previously – with her duo project AyOwA’s song Sommer – revealed that she has an ambivalent relationship with the season.
“We wait and wait for summer and it rarely lives up to all expectations. It is an intense time, because here in Scandinavia we experience summer as a short time, we must maximize before it gets dark again. I get overwhelmed by it. The intense now reminds me that it’s over so quickly. There is a huge amount of heaviness and melancholy in the summer for me. Everything is beautiful and clear, but also skinless and vulnerable ”.
Ocean Letters is written in a time of turmoil, where the waves of water and time have inspired Hannah Schneider’s universe of contrasts. Where she has found her classical roots and connected them to her electronic universe. Where gravity and hope, vulnerability and beauty exist side by side at all times.
