Working under the influence of John Cage’s music seems like a tough gig for a composer. Cage’s maxims about creativity have always been seductive in their revolutionary openness, which is why plenty of artists who don’t sound much like him have benefitted from his lectures and articles. But for those who draw specific assistance from his own sound production methods, the pitfalls are steep. Once any contemporary pianist starts putting metal bolts and scraps of plastic into a piano’s body, odds are they’re going to sound overly indebted to Cage, the father of the “prepared piano.” If you’re going to follow him down that particular route, you better be able to make your “prepared piano” sound distinct. On Bloodroot, the composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran clears this high bar with plenty of room to spare, thanks to two different kinds of insight: one technological in nature, the other more poetic.
In the first case, Moran expands the “prepared piano” into the electronic-keyboard realm. Moran’s acoustic instrument produces odd, flinty, or rattling timbres, similar to Cage’s. But by pre-recording some plucks and sweeps of the prepared piano's strings, Moran has created an electro-acoustic hybrid instrument that lets her layer various effects with disarming smoothness. While one hand is playing a percussive line on the acoustic piano, another hand can trigger playback of an e-bowed string’s silken drone, or else a harp-like string swoop. Other contemporary composers have used traditional pianos in tandem with sampling keyboards. But Moran’s application of the practice to the world of “prepared piano” is a smart extension of the practice. This recalls how Cage himself once approvingly quoted the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: “The past does not influence me; I influence it.”
Moran doesn’t always rely on technological savvy—she can flat-out compose, too. The album’s first two tracks find her performing all-acoustically. The opening miniature, “Iris,” unhurriedly allows pairs of notes or short arpeggiated figures to ring out. The sounds are delicate and unusual. After these individual pitches are established, Moran then serves up three stark, thick chords that combine some of those tones—while also adding in new notes from a lower octave. Inside a couple of minutes, a listener can start to trust that this composer-performer will use her unfamiliar tools to create richly dramatic arcs.
During “Celandine,” Moran’s melodic ingenuity shines. After a rising prepared-piano figure has wormed its way into your consciousness, the pianist allows gorgeous, mournful progressions to flower underneath that repetitive top line. When the harmony shifts, a listener gets to try out several new lenses on that same emotional field, before returning to the original view. (As a long tour over some forlorn emotional landscape, the track threatens to beat Radiohead at their own game.)
From there, Moran starts to let her sampling kit loose. “Freesia” begins with a fast-cycling motif that points toward the composer’s stated fascination with metal. A couple minutes later, Moran takes a hard aesthetic turn, courtesy of a sampled drone chord, which she then improvises over. Heard on this pinched-sounding piano, Moran’s patient, languid lines foster airs of mystery and ritual.
The most consistent pleasure on Bloodroot is listening for the ways these odd songs produce their unlikely hooks. The string-strums and tight clusters of augmented notes that open “Hyacinth” don’t initially commend themselves to long-term memory, but as stray lines emerge from the haze, the replay value of the composition becomes clear. Mastered by Krallice’s Colin Marston, the recordings on Bloodroot capture the textural diversity of Moran’s schemes. And in the end, the occasional similarity to Cage’s prepared piano doesn’t seem like the most important takeaway. The real news is that Moran can sound equally as free, and just as unencumbered by the weight of history, as her own idol.
