Hania Rani plays Glasgow's SWG3 next week

Born Hania Raniszewska in the Polish port city of Gdansk and trained at the Warsaw conservatoire now named for its most famous student – one Frédéric Chopin – she currently lives in Berlin, where so many European composers and dance music producers are domiciled.

A recent profile on BBC Radio 4 describes her as a “mysterious” and “waif like” composer, one headed for a career as a classical pianist until she became “sidetracked” by jazz and electronic music. Whatever the truth of the personal description – and there’s nothing mysterious or enigmatic about the friendly face on the other end of the Zoom call from me – Rani is certainly cutting a swathe through that place where classical, jazz and electronica meet.

So how does she feel about the neoclassical tag? Politely disinclined to run with it, is the answer. “I nthink it doesn’t really match my music,” she says. “My style is quite versatile. I just composed a piano concert for symphony orchestra, which is a contemporary piece, but also I sing and play synths and drum machines. Maybe it’s just contemporary music.”

Max Richter (Image: free)

Whatever you call it, one of Rani’s undoubted influences is the character of her hometown and the landscape around it – or, more appropriate to her atmospheric compositions, the seascape which abuts it. “The opportunity to go to the seaside and see the horizon was very important,” she says of her childhood. “And it’s not Mediterranean seas, it’s quite moody. It has this vibe. You become sensitive to the many shades of grey.”

Gdansk’s rich music scene affected her too. She was only seven when she began piano lessons and she followed that with 20 years of classical training. But when she was 13 she encountered jazz for the first time. “It’s not the biggest city in Poland but it’s quite significant when it comes to music and especially jazz, so there was a lot of going on. You could go and listen to really amazing jazz players and see great artists there.”

That first exposure to a more fluid musical form was huge. Rani continued her classical studies and even spent time as part of an indie-pop duo called Tęskno. But the interest in jazz saw her begin to bring improvisation to her solo performances – check out her appearance at last year’s Nancy Pulsations Jazz festival in France for more on that – and her habit of playing with a Ukraine flag pinned to her back adds an intensity to the live shows, a visible silent protest glimpsed as she flits between keyboards or attends to the modulators and effects boxes shaping her soundscapes.

“Our current geo-political situation really affects me,” she admits when I ask about it. “I can’t say I don’t read the news. I do, and I feel all these things so Ghosts is also about this – death and life, but understood in a very direct way.”

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One song on the new album, Moans, addresses the war explicitly. “It’s a traumatising experience and unfortunately it’s not over so I think in this manner it definitely changed me. With Ghosts, I couldn’t just stay silent.”

Though she has previously recorded for prestigious classical label Deutsche Grammophon, Rani is signed to Manchester-based Gondwana Records. It’s home to UK jazz luminaries such as Chip Wickham, GoGo Penguin, Mercury Prize-nominated ambient jazzers The Portico Quartet and label founder Matthew Halsall, a noted jazz trumpeter.

But where her two previous albums for Gondwana have relied on Rani’s voice alone, and set it against piano and spare electronics, Ghosts changes the formula. For a start there are collaborators. Helpmates include Halsall himself, Icelandic Neoclassical luminary Ólafur Arnalds (best known in the UK for his soundtrack to ITV crime drama Broadchurch), Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, and Duncan Bellamy, mainstay of The Portico Quartet.

“When I sat down and started to think about the album I thought I wanted to do it differently, which means I needed other people on it because if I was doing it alone it would just be similar to what I’ve already done,” she explains. “It was also important to me that I didn’t reach out to people that I don’t know, so each of these artists are my friend. We know each other, we appreciate each other’s work and I obviously admire them.”

If the approach is different, so is the resulting sound. Ghosts pulsates with synthesisers and at times has an almost downtempo club feel. Tracks like Hello and Thin Line even have what sound like kick drums.

Hania Rani. Picture Jakub Stoszek (Image: free)

“My composing process didn’t start with the piano this time but with different instruments. Very often it was my synthesiser,” she says. “It was like a starting point. It’s a keyboard instrument but it is also able to trigger a lot of rhythm motifs and rhythm elements. I think it encouraged me to take this direction.”

Hers is a Prophet, a cult item manufactured in the US since the late 1970s and used on records by everyone from Michael Jackson and Madonna to Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Rani bought hers second-hand from a hip-hop producer friend. She has since acquired a second one and they’re both with her on her current UK tour.

“I think this is part of my identity, that I just like to try out new things,” she says finally, nodding to herself. “I feel like this is my duty.”

Ghosts is out now on Gondwana Records. Hania Rani plays SWG3 in Glasgow on March 7