Composer, producer, synthesist, Warp Records signee and touring member of Oneohtrix Point Never’s live band, Kelly Moran is many things, but first and foremost, she is a pianist.
Imaginatively exploring the sonic potential of her chosen instrument through technological transformation, Moran’s previous work has made use of prepared piano, extended techniques and electronics to take her prodigious instrumental talent to new worlds.
Moran’s latest project, Moves in the Field, shifts the focus of her experimentation from the timbre of the piano to how it’s played. Working with the Yamaha Disklavier, a MIDI-equipped grand piano capable of playing itself, Moran improvised, recorded and programmed a series of duets for herself and the instrument, joining forces with the Disklavier to achieve pianistic feats inaccessible to a human player.
Merging her own performances with the instrument’s self-playing abilities, Moran played and programmed intricately intersecting melodic patterns, surgically editing their MIDI data in Logic before routing them back to the piano to be recorded, processed and carefully mixed. “My imagination exploded at all the possibilities this instrument allowed me to create,” she tells us.
Moves in the Field isn’t merely an exercise in technicality, though; suffused with melancholy and grandeur, these pieces possess an emotional depth that stretches fathoms. Moran’s serpentine melodies and complex arrangements confound and realign our expectations of piano music, and the project as a whole – like the rest of her output – boldly reimagines what a pianist can be in the 21st century.
We sat down with Kelly Moran to find out more about the making of Moves in the Field.
You began playing piano at quite a young age, but we’re interested to find out when electronics and production became a part of your creative process?
“Around the time I was 15 I started to experimentIt’s an electronic piece of music but it had some acoustic elements in it. I really just wanted to make something that could balance both of those things.
