Don’t Trust Mirrors

Halfway through writing Don’t Trust Mirrors, Kelly Moran stopped in her tracks. She had made a name for herself with the prepared piano, making John Cage’s approach to the instrument accessible to a new generation through 2018’s heady, LSD-inspired Ultraviolet. Moran partied her way through the following European tour, playing festival sets early in the day and raving deep into the night. This, she decided, is what she should do next: take the prepared piano even further by inspiring people to dance to it. Then Covid hit. She had moved in with her mother after her parents’ divorce, and now she was stuck at home. “I was regressing the fuck out and I was… trying to write clubby piano music? Like no, this is not happening,” she explained. “I was going to make my great techno record in my bedroom with my mom in the next room over, while there’s a pandemic? Yeah, the inspiration just died.”

This wasn’t the end of Don’t Trust Mirrors, but a new beginning. Moran took what she had so far, five compositions for prepared piano and electronics, and rewrote them for the Disklavier, a modern player piano that allowed her to reproduce her own playing and “duet” with herself. She wrote five more Disklavier tracks to complete last year’s Moves in the Field, a set of seemingly impossible piano songs that are as cerebral as they are dizzying. Then, Moran returned to Don’t Trust Mirrors by rewriting those additional pieces for her original setup. These are truly companion albums, as the recording of one led directly into the other, and then vice versa, in a sort of creative ouroboros. Don’t Trust Mirrors is the snake’s head and tail: the project’s flash of inspiration and its culmination, the point where Moran lost her passion for the prepared piano and found it again.

The record’s five earliest pieces (the first four tracks, plus “Reappearing”) date from 2019 and 2020, when Moran wanted to take the prepared piano to the dancefloor. It’s easy to imagine album opener “Echo in the Field” blasting out over a late-night festival stage: A repeating synth line introduces buzzing bass chords, with the chiming piano carrying a clear melody over the top. Don’t Trust Mirrors isn’t really a dance record, though, and this club-friendly feel disappears quickly as Moran focuses on the timbral character of the prepared piano. “Prism drift” and “Sans sodalis” are built on spacious, ringing harmonics, not likely to move bodies, but to leave them stock-still and blissfully overwhelmed. These versions were later reworked into their more subdued partners, “Hypno” and “Sodalis (II),” for Moves in the Field, and their effect here is like seeing a familiar stage play shot in IMAX, with small, expressive gestures made grandly cinematic.

In the second half of Don’t Trust Mirrors, Moran largely works in the opposite direction, translating those songs written for Disklavier into pieces for prepared piano and synth. These tracks stand out from their originals through textural variety rather than compositional complexity. “Systems,” for example, is recognizable as Moves in the Field’s “Superhuman,” but it finds new force in the prepared piano’s clanging strings. At times, it sounds more like gamelan and with a bit of subtle synth, it becomes quietly sinister. The more variable sound of Moran’s electronics can completely alter a track, too: “Leitmotif,” a delicate little thing that unfurls like a rose petal on Moves in the Field, is big and airy and resonant as “Cathedral,” with tinkling notes spilling into an ambient wash of synth and disappearing in the cavernous distance.

Companion albums are nothing new for Moran, who released the improvisatory rush that became Ultraviolet later, unedited, as the Origin EP. But the relationship between Don’t Trust Mirrors and its predecessor is different, more involved, and ultimately more illuminating: Neither of these albums could exist without the other; neither is a first draft, though they each started where the other left off. Hold them up next to each other and you can see Moran reflected more accurately than in either: a picture of the artist becoming herself.

Kelly Moran: Don’t Trust Mirrors

$33 at Rough Trade

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