Ryoka Hagiwara – “In A Haze”

Ryoka Hagiwara comes at solo piano from a film composer’s angle. Born in Tokyo, raised in London and now busy scoring shorts and animation, she writes in pictures as much as in notes. “In A Haze,” recorded back near her childhood home and tied to a new strand of work about memory and identity, feels like her first real statement away from the screen.

The piece opens on low, heavy chords that land with a kind of quiet pressure, closer to a slow storm than a gentle prelude. From there she keeps circling the same harmonic center, but the touch changes: voicings lift, lines curl upward, and the mood shifts into something closer to fantasy than straight melancholy. You can hear a bit of late-Romantic piano language in the middle section, a hint of Chopin in the way she lets the right hand sing over steady left hand patterns, but the style stays very much her own. Across a fairly fixed tempo she threads through a few distinct moods: tension, release, nostalgia – without stopping to underline them, so the track feels like watching different moments from the same old memory flicker in and out.

For sync, “In A Haze” is made for reflective material: prestige drama, literary adaptations, slow indie films, or game cutscenes where a character is thinking back on something they can’t quite place. It would sit well under closing monologues, childhood flashbacks, end-of-episode fades, or documentary sequences about home, loss, or distance, any place you need solo piano that can carry both weight and warmth without pulling focus from the story.