HANNAH MORIAH
"Hannah Moriah is the voice in your dreams" - SF Examiner
Hannah Moriah’s essence as a songstress shares much in common with the little redwood-laden mountaintop hideaway where she spent many of her formative years. The warm, airy sunstreaked afternoons permeated by the comforting smell of wildflowers and the lowly murmur of ravens. As night falls, the stars alight and shine down like astral fireflies, the warm air suddenly chilled in the ghostly sylvan shadows of the towering trees. Her music is the spirit of her land, both its fairytale and its fact, and an attempt to reconcile her dreamlike childhood at the mountaintop edge of civilization with the urban jungle in which she currently finds herself somnambulant and nostalgic.
Trained as a cellist in her youth, Hannah diverted from her childhood instrument when she began teaching herself guitar. Her dexterity and an unusually eloquent lyricism dovetail with a dreamy, graceful voice: "Angelic and elegant, her vocals seem aged beyond her years.” Her songs create "a mood for what could be the end of the world or the soundtrack to a dreamscape" (SF Examiner, 2009)
Deriving much inspiration from the night, her dreams and the forest of songbirds that is our collective unconscious, Hannah has described many of her pieces as “nocturnes.” A former vocalist of Bay Area psyche-kraut-revival act The Lumerians, she has provided vocals to The Bins (1320 Records), Sleepy Sun, among others. Hannah's debut album Picayune was released to the streets on April 17, 2011, and if you’re a lucky ducky, you may find a hand-stamped copy featuring artwork by Hannah herself.
All good things take time…and Rattler’s Garden is just such a thing.
Several years in the making, Rattler’s Garden showcases many of the hallmark characteristics of a labor of love: hand-crafted and pensive, it blossoms in a sequence of well-curated, diaphanous gestures.
Hannah Moriah (Sleepy Sun, Whitethorn Singers) has born into the world a cherished, hard-earned heirloom - a record born of (and during) turbulent times, but turned over again and again, worn smooth by the hands of its loving creatrix. The album is retrospective, but not overtly nostalgic, acknowledging that although the past may be passed, it’s tumult informs the present moment, presaging the conditions of growth that propel each of us into the unknown, the unknowable.
The “rattler” in Rattler’s Garden is the percussionist of life’s danse macabre - its rhythms accompany the ballet towards its inevitable conclusion, but also serve as a warning cry, bemoaning the mortal fate of we, the dancers perched on a knife’s edge.
Like the fruits of Fall’s harvest, all good things take time…
(But what is time, anyway?)
By Nick Stanley
Album Art by Bryan Proteau (Clovenhoov)