Earlier in the month we introduced Howling World, a brand new album from Aaron Hodges’s drone-folk project Kin Hana. “[The] full-length feels like an embodiment of Hodges’s vision, where personal intimacy is matched by an elemental, almost otherworldly atmosphere,” we wrote, “[managing] to communicate both immediate, instinctive emotion (be that wonder, longing or dread) and genuine thematic depth.” Drawing inspiration from René Magritte’s ‘Young Girl Eating a Bird’, the title track evoked the surreal, oftentimes irrational contemporary moment and our conflicted position within it. “I was drawn to the contradiction in the image—she seems to be turning away from the world while at the same time literally devouring a piece of it,” Hodges explained. “The ‘howling world’ became both the senseless world she’s turning away from and the one she’s suddenly part of. I realized that feeling ran through much of the record, and the song eventually gave the album its name.”
With the release of Howling World just under a month away via Black Meadow, Kin Hana has shared brand new track ‘Earthrise’. This time turning to the Apollo 8 ‘Earthrise’ photograph as well as Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey for influence, Hodges considers the human condition across its full timespan, from our primitive beginnings to the frontiers of technological possibility. In doing so, he manages to locate the yearning for connection and community which has persisted from our first days, and will persist to the last. The result centers the mythic presence of both the past and the future, twin otherworlds which loom large over the present, warping the material of our existence with equal parts pessimism and possibility.
Watch the video directed and edited by Marjorie LeWit below:
Howling World is set for release on the 23rd October via Black Meadow and you can pre-order it now.
