Kelly MoranBest Kelly Moran Albums Ranked

Moves in the Field

loudandquiet

9.0

“Moves in the Field abandons Kelly Moran’s acclaimed work with prepared piano and instead finds her dueting with her Disklavier (a real but programable, electrocmechanical piano). Gone are the unpredictable percussive elements from earlier work, and instead, keeping up with her impossibly perfect partner pushes her abilities further than ever before. The auteur’s spiralling patterns are transfixin”

Ultraviolet

loudandquiet

9.0

“Kelly Moran’s breakout second album, last year’s ‘Bloodroot’, was an exercise in restraint: everything on the record originated exclusively from the piano being plucked, struck, ebowed or otherwise tampered with in order to break away from the traditional sound of the world’s most ubiquitous musical instrument. That restraint is gleefully discarded for her follow-up and debut for Warp, as acoustic”

Moves in the Field

pitchfork

7.8

“Working with the Yamaha Disklavier—a digital descendant of the player piano—the New York musician explores the tension between technical precision and emotional reverie.”

Bloodroot

pitchfork

7.8

“The composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran draws inspiration from John Cage’s “prepared piano,” extending the practice with electronic keyboards and melodic ingenuity.”

Origin EP

pitchfork

7.7

“The New York pianist’s stripped-back companion piece to her electronic-tinged 2018 album Ultraviolet is an engrossing ode to the act of creation.”

Ultraviolet

pitchfork

7.6

“The prepared-piano specialist abandons the meticulous compositions of her previous albums, editing down improvisations and bejeweling them with layers of synthesizers and effects.”