Aaron Carroll Hodges is a multifaceted artist whose talents range from dancing to acting and singing. In a decade, he’s created an oeuvre that draws from sources as disparate as Popol Vuh and the Knife. Of late he’s performed under the Kin Hana moniker. His considerable skills are on display via Au Sable, an album he recorded in his Brooklyn apartment and at a friend’s home in Beacon, NY. There are gorgeous vocal harmonies, dashes of field recordings, and layers of guitar and piano. The album also features a backstory about a 1930s celebrity golfer and a Japanese immigrant. All that with doses of German electronic experimentalism and doom metal thrown in for good measure.
The tune “You” leans a little more heavily on familiar folk tropes. At least at first before giving way to aural experimentation, swaths of eerie soundscapes and what sounds like it could be a ceremonial/ritual drum beneath vocals that are communicating something either quite soothing or perhaps even a little sinister. And then it’s over. Like a Modernist poem, it closes without a full sense of resolution; the listener left hanging on an elliptical statement. The only possible way of discovering its meaning is to listen again and then perhaps once more.
Hodges, who has previously recorded under the moniker Longshoreman, looked to his family for his latest moniker. Kin Hana was the name of his paternal great-grandfather, a Japanese national who settled in the New York town of Au Sable. It was there that the former sailor set up a restaurant and was later robbed at gunpoint by golfer John Montague, who was eventually acquitted of the crime by a jury despite several eyewitness accounts.
This, however, is only the beginning of the many secrets Hodges has planted in both the identity and the music on Au Sable.