Introducing: Victoria Hanna
"The concept of being a singer is very boring. It’s much more interesting for me to feel that I am a sculptor, I am a painter in sound. The space is my canvas, my voice is the paint. The letters are my buddies." –Victoria Hanna
While she is not new to our journal, we at Greedy for Best Music are more than happy to welcome the one and only Victoria Hanna to our musical family! You may have heard her on the catchy Balkan Beat Box track "Adir Adirim" or seen her in the official music video to her first single "The Aleph-Bet Song", in which she basically sings the Hebrew alphabet in the most mesmerising of ways, or her equally spellbinding follow-up single "22 Letters".
She is truly a phenomenon, an artist of the voice, who channels the power of language, while venturing into Kabbalistic rap, Aramaic hiphop and Israeli pop. AND in August, we will be releasing Victoria Hanna's debut album internationally!
"My debut album consists entirely of ancient Hebrew texts with which I grew up. It is divided into two sections, two worlds that I explore – voice and speech. Voice is abstract, free in space. Speech is concrete, conceptual and rhythmic," says Victoria Hanna.
Raised in a strictly orthodox tradition, she has meanwhile liberated herself from the confines of that orthodoxy, while at the same time preserving and continuing its cultural heritage, which she has translated into an idiosyncratic and thoroughly contemporary context.
Her fascination with language was sparked by an inborn speech disability, as a childhood stutter turned out to be her greatest gift, leading her to explore the magical boundaries of sound and diction. She embarked on an inner journey to explore the mouth as creator, which became the inspirational and emotional journey of her life.
Victoria Hanna's debut features ten of her own original songs, tracing an arc from pop to hiphop to Israeli music, exquisitely combining the ancient, the traditional and the modern. In her songs and compelling videos, her image and design, Hanna creates a unique and distinctive world that is entirely her own.
She will be performing tonight (June 30th) at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and at Le Carreau Du Temple in Paris on August 8th. Feel free to visit her artist page for more on her background, upcoming shows, videos, reviews, related articles and more. Also, you can watch her 2015 TEDx talk on "Voicing Space, Sensing Speech" below. Stay tuned for more...
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