The latest Warp album from the New York composer/pianist Kelly Moran, Don’t Trust Mirrors, is the culmination of six years of work, and it sounds like a definitive career statement. In retrospect, 2024’s conventionally pretty neo-classical record Moves in the Field stands as an anomaly in her catalog. Its elegant, sprightly piano pieces diverge from more dissonant Moran albums such as Bloodroot (2017) and Ultraviolet (2018). Now, she’s back to making hypnotic compositions that subtly clank outside of polite society’s expectations.
A disciple of John Cage, Moran uses prepared-piano techniques — inserting objects on and between the strings, sometimes playing the strings with her fingers or an EBow — along with electronic-music treatments (she’s collaborated with Daniel Lopatin and performed in Oneohtrix Point Never’s band on the Age Of tour, and it shows). Time and again on Don’t Trust Mirrors, Moran tricks the listener into thinking the main instrument here is harp, which, if you’re a fan of Mary Lattimore or Brandee Younger, is a plus. This legerdemain reflects the title’s admonition that all is not what it seems.
On opener “Echo in the Field,” bubbly synth percolates over harp-like accents and bass-y undercurrents, as a melody of cautious optimism, perhaps conceived as COVID lockdown was ending, emerges. With “Prism Drift,” Moran plucks a piano to fashion cyclical, icy tones, finessing them into a delicately beautiful melody. A savvy musical director should use it in a film to score the protagonist making a life-changing decision. “Systems” is a kinetic cut with engrossing counterpoint, like a Nala Sinephro jawn, but with a more robust attack on the keyboards. Mirrors closes with its most enigmatic and ambitious track, “Cathedral,” evoking the stained-glass gravity of a Goblin giallo soundtrack. This is a deceptively pretty album in which all of the experiments succeed.
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