piana - raula Seven years after her previous album "muse" ,piana's fifth full album, "raula." "Raula" means "humming" in Icelandic. Starting with a song that is literally in a humming style, the album moves through a quiet space, then to a prologue, brimming with hope, which opens up a fantasy adventure story feel for the last half of the album.The lyrics are all in imagined words, designed so that listeners can imagine an abstract, beautiful fantasy world, no matter what country they are from. Track 10, "alfur" evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of Nordic fairies, and in Track 14, "clocher," a beautiful melody intertwined with piano is spun. From the layered vocals used to create a rustic, church style chorus in Track 6, "North," to splendid worldviews, the album offers views of various different scenes throughout the 19 songs. With a nostalgia for medieval foreign countries, the album was recorded with live instruments such as organ, piano, and violin, and is delicately packaged with a vividly fresh sense of transparency. Also, these songs, which piana crafted from composition to arrangement herself, impeccably showcase a wide range of expressiveness and create a new frontier in works where beautiful melodies overlap with multi layered vocals. This work features Hiromi Kurosaki (piano), and Atowa Yuri (violin). The mastering was done by KASHIWA Daisuke.