“Every year at the end of the school year, he would do an illegal concert in the dance building because there was a piano there that they let you prepare.” In the popular yearly tradition - held at midnight on the last day of class - Rush would play John Cage’s mid-Forties prepared piano landmark Sonatas and Interludes. “I didn’t get credit, but he taught me out of the kindness of his heart,” says Moran. She studied composition, studio engineering and piano performance at the University of Michigan, where professor Stephen Rush taught her about modern composition. Moran was classically trained and, as a teenager, gravitated to alt-rockers like Tori Amos, art-metal bands like Kayo Dot and electronic envelope-pushers like Autechre. It’s a long way from her origins as a six-year-old playing an antique piano in Long Island.
And her third studio album, Ultraviolet, is being released this week by Warp Records, the prestigious electronic music label that’s home to Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Flying Lotus. She was plucked to be the touring keyboardist for Oneohtrix Point Never’s deconstructed, apocalyptic live rock band. Her last album, 2017’s Bloodroot, made critical year-end lists. In fact, despite working in the esoteric discipline of prepared piano - the John Cage-ian technique of manipulating piano strings with carefully placed bolts, screws and sundry objects - Moran has found a steadily growing audience.
Part of me was like, ‘No one’s ever going to hear this, but I need to do it for myself anyway, because if I don’t I’m just going to feel like I’m dead.'” “I had so many rejections, and so many that were based around the fact that what I was doing was too niche. “I kind of just accepted that no one would really care about my work because I was such a weirdo,” says New York’s Kelly Moran, an avant-garde composer and pianist who drones, plucks and buzzes on the lines between modern classical, ambient, electroacoustic and jazz.
0 kommentar(er)
