The recording project of New York-based songwriter Aaron Carroll Hodges, Kin Hana combines the traditions of folk, ambient-drone and synth music to form something weighty and dark. As we wrote in a previous piece, Hodges recorded under his own name and the moniker Longshoreman before adopting Kin Hana, the name of his Japanese grandfather who arrived in the US as a sailor back in the early 1900s, landing in San Francisco before traversing the country and settling in the Adirondack region of New York state.
The music of Kin Hana might not be directly concerned with Kin Hana the man, but something of its sound evokes concepts of memory and loss and time, Hodges’s embrace of drone and metal sensibilities presenting a dark, existential air. Running in juxtaposition to that are Hodges’s vocals, often tender near-whispers cast among the soar and squall like brittle attempts at communication across divides both geographic and temporal. “Fragile but strangely elemental,” we wrote of closing track ‘You’ on the debut Kin Hana album, Au Sable, “it sounds like soundtrack to shifting weather patterns, the ominous sense of an approaching storm […] Hodges’s vocals glimmering within the murk, lighting it up from the inside.”
After standalone single ‘The Wolf’ saw Kin Hana venture into the metal sphere, Hodges is back with a brand new song, ‘Fog’, which we’re delighted to be able to share today. Highlighting another string to his bow, the track is stripped right back to acoustic guitar, pitched somewhere between the stark poetry of Jason Molina and the warm sincerity of Mt. Eerie. Background flourishes emerge as the song develops, subtle orchestral up-drafts and whispered samples culminating in a soaring, shimmering climax.
