Kelly Moran is something of an obsessive when it comes to professional figure skating. âItâs such an aesthetically pleasing sport to watch,â she tells me from the L.A. apartment sheâs camped out in for the week while on tour with Oneohtrix Point Never. Weâve been chatting for a couple hours at this point, having the kind of relaxed, meandering conversation thatâs to be expected when talking to someone whoâs just trying to catch their breath in-between stops on a major album rollout and international concert tour. But once the topic of figure skating enters into the conversation, Moran completely hits pause on everything else to start eagerly waxing poetic about her favorite sport.
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"These are the most inspiring people to me. You have to work so hard to be able to do this,â she says, pointing to a video of 2018 Olympic champion Alina Zagitova from the 2018 Winter Olympics full of immaculate splits, double axels, and death drops. âThis to me is the apex of human expression right here. This is on par with Starry Night, or Bach, or whatever.âMoran is no stranger herself to pulling off incredible feats of poise and prowess. The previous night, Iâd seen her deliver a twisting, graceful performance as part of Oneohtrix Point Neverâs operatic new show MYRIAD, helping to bring his proggy new album Age Of to life with her hallucinatory approach to electroacoustic piano music. âIf you had asked me a year ago who Iâd want to work with, he would absolutely be the number one person,â she says. âThis whole experience has just been a surreal dream.â If that wasnât enough, sheâs preparing to release her transcendent, enveloping new album Ultraviolet this weekâher debut album for the legendary electronic label Warp Records.Though all this recognition may have originally come to her as a shock, itâs easy to see why Moranâs enchanting, celestial music has resonated so much with listeners. On Ultraviolet, Moran tackles the piano with a highly personal approach, brushing away all the stiff academia that permeates the classically trained crowd she hails from to make room for music as boundless and heady as it is welcoming.
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The first time I listened to the album was on a short visit to my hometown in Colorado, putting it on in the dark one night as I drifted off while staying at my girlfriendâs old house. As I lay there in this place thatâs held so many memories for me, Moranâs music seemed to fill the room with a ghostly, nocturnal presence, one that felt both private and infinite in the same breath. The way she plays piano has a way of seeming still even as it shifts about in all directions at once. She often focuses on just a few sparse notes that pirouette endlessly around each other, like feet gliding down a spiral staircase. While it reminds me of the melancholy chamber music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, or perhaps Lubomyr Melnyk's highly textural approach to piano, Moranâs latest record ultimately finds her tackling a wavelength all her own.
A Long Island piano prodigy born with perfect pitch, Moran started her journey on a fairly traditional path. Studying music at the University of Michigan and completing her MFA at the University of California, Irvine, Moran sought to explore the ideas of 20th-century composers like Steve Reich and John Cage in her work, much to the disdain of her professors. âI never really felt accepted by the classical music world,â Moran tells me, recounting stories of being frowned at for performing Philip Glass pieces in class, and even getting kicked out of a lecture for not knowing that the final movement of a Schoenberg suite was meant to represent the bells at Mahlerâs funeral.
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âAll of these programs right now are still very old school, and theyâre run by people who believe that we have to preserve the canon,â she says. âItâs so much easier to be in an experimental music scene than a classical music scene because people donât have those same notions of adhering to genre or tradition. Theyâre more free about it, and thatâs how I am.âShe jumped coasts the moment she got her MFA, finding a new home for herself in Brooklynâs local avant-punk community. After spending a few years playing with noisy bands like Cellular Chaos and Voice Coils, she began to experiment with âprepared pianoââa technique usually attributed to John Cage that involves inserting screws and various other objects into the strings of the piano to alter its timbreâand set out to incorporate the practice into her own music. âI had played prepared piano before, but I had never composed anything with it,â she says. âIt really changed my writing process. All the overtones and the different sounds I was hearing, it altered my approach to harmony. Something about it sounded more delicate.âThe product of her work was 2017âs Bloodroot, a dissonant, crystalline album that, while beautiful, found Moran tying herself to a pretty specific niche of experimental music. âI started contacting labels, and I got so many rejections,â she says. âLike hilarious rejections. There were people who were just like, âThank you, but we would never, ever touch prepared piano.ââ Against all odds, however, not only did Moran find a sympathetic partner in Brooklyn avant-garde label Telegraph Harp; Bloodroot ended up launching her into the spotlight, garnering end-of-year placements in The New York Times and Rolling Stone, and introducing a new wave of people to her strange yet accessible style of neo-classical experimentalism.
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That summer however, Moran experienced a major epiphany that altered her entire approach to making music. It came to her one day when she was wandering in the forest near her childhood home in Long Island. âI had this moment where I was listening to the echoes of the trees and the birds and everything I was hearing, and I was thinking about how beautiful and how effortless it sounded,â she says. âThese sounds werenât trying to happenâthey were just happening naturally. It kind of reminded me about how hard I had been trying to force my music out, and I had this moment where I was like, âHow can I make music that feels like this? How can I make music that doesnât feel like Iâm sitting at the piano, writing out every note?ââKelly returned to the house that day, and sat down to play the piano, but with a newfound sense of inspiration. âWhen I started playing piano that day, I literally had no intention at all. It was just to improvise, and it was purely out of joy,â she says. "And when I let go of all of the preconceived ideas that I had about making music, it really freed me.â Moran knew a little bit about improvising from her day job playing piano for ballet recitals; but she had never considered incorporating it into her own work before, and she suddenly found her music becoming more textured and emotional than ever before. âUsually when youâre composing, youâre comparing, âdoes this sound better? Or does this sound better?â When youâre improvising, different connections are happening, and music just came out of me differently that day because I wasnât trying; I just let it happen.â
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Soon, Moran began studiously transcribing her improvised recordings note for note, and gradually re-taught herself how to perform them for her next album. âTranscribing was a trip,â she tells me, âBecause I was like, âHoly shit, I canât believe this is what my brain does.â I just made tonal decisions that I never wouldâve made if I was really sitting down and planning it out.ââ
In this way, the album represents a meeting between two schools of musical thought, blending free-form improvisation and meticulous, precise notation to create a spiralling, ethereal song cycle. When Moran shows me the sheet music for her song âNereidâ (which was originally titled âRunning Music,â because it essentially consists of her fingers doing a marathon), all I see are countless pages of notes cascading up, and down, over and over again, like a hypnotic tide unfolding endlessly across a sea of staff paper.Moranâs linking up with Warp Records was as fateful and fluid as her recordings. Around the same time that she was looking for a label to help release her latest work, she received a surprise message one day from one of her favorite artists of all time: Daniel Lopatin. âI was literally wearing a Garden of Delete shirt the first time he ever messaged me,â she says. âIt was fucked up.âLopatin appreciated Moranâs ear for timbre and arrangement, and DMâd her out of the blue one day to ask if sheâd like to go on tour as his backing keyboardist. Like an underground-synth fairytale come true, Moran was brought onboard for OPNâs monumental new MYRIAD concert tourâand when Lopatin caught wind of Moranâs unreleased new album, he was so impressed with what he heard that he agreed to help her put the finishing touches on it. He soon passed it on to his buddies at Warp, who decided to ink a record deal.Itâs been a rollercoaster year for Kelly Moran, but throughout it all, sheâs managed to remain level-headed and true to her original passion for the piano that started it all. As we flip through video after video of ice skaters and discuss how she got to where she is, she pulls up a video of Alena Kostornaia set to a gentle, moving piano ballad by Max Richter (one of Moranâs favorite contemporary composers). Watching such feats of strength appear so elegant, effortless, and mesmerizing all at once, Moran suddenly turned to me with palpable excitement. âIn figure skating, you need that extreme athleticism, but you also have to make it artistic,â she says to me. âIf youâre not both, then youâre not going to be successful. Thatâs what I love about skaters. Theyâre technicians, and theyâre artists. And thatâs what I am.â
Sam Goldner is a writer based in Los Angeles. Read more of Sam's work on Twitter.