Musician Kelly Moran has toured with FKA Twigs and spent a decade perfecting a style of music which stands uniquely on its own. Her new album on Warp furthers her own work, and offers challenges subtle and profound. Moves in the Field is deceptively lovely, and inerringly precise in execution.
Moving away from the prepared piano of past offerings, Kelly Moran uses the Disklavier here. This allows a sort of duet to take place between her own playing on the acoustic piano and the Disklavier. A track like "Superhuman", for example, finds that interplay coming into focus as Moran's key-strokes spar with more rapid and complex responses from the Disklavier. "Don't Trust Mirrors" is even better, with the notes entering into what feels like a dialogue. The track is insistent on its own terms.
Kelly Moran wields an inventiveness as well as a deliberate touch. Selections like "Leitmotif" and the haunting "It's Okay to Disappear" are uncluttered, the ideas put forward ones which seem to be deliberate and meaningful. There's much to be said for the notes not played, and the spaces between notes here on Moves in the Field. Moran's best material has a kind of tension to it, one which is like the iced-over surface of a lake where you don't quite know where it's safe to step. In another era I'd call this minimalist, maybe. It's of a piece with music from Philip Glass and John Adams so whatever term you use to describe their work, maybe use it here after you play this and get swept up in this stuff too.
Moves in the Field by Kelly Moran is out now on Warp.
[Photo: Brandon Bowen]