\n<\/p>\n
As spring 2022 bloomed, Irena Wang emailed the pianist Kelly Moran to ask for a mixtape.<\/p>\n
They had briefly met just days before \u2014 at the funeral of Wang\u2019s partner of seven years and Moran\u2019s high-school sweetheart in the little Long Island town where they grew up. He had died from an accidental overdose, eight months after becoming a father.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was my first love, my first heartbreak, my first everything,\u201d Moran remembered one evening after dark in Yamaha\u2019s sprawling Midtown Manhattan piano studio in early February, a week before she turned 36. \u201cI saw his widow and infant son, and it was one of the saddest moments of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wang\u2019s husband, Damian, had always bragged about Moran, and even accompanied Wang to see her play with Oneohtrix Point Never in Los Angeles. After the funeral, Wang sent her an email: \u201cI really want to know you, but I need some time. Can you maybe recommend some music?\u201d<\/p>\n
Moran dumped 28 albums into Dropbox. That stylistic tangle \u2014 the serene throb of Gas\u2019s \u201cPop,\u201d the mesmeric pull of John Adams\u2019s \u201cThe Dharma at Big Sur,\u201d the magnetic oddities of Broadcast\u2019s \u201cTender Buttons\u201d \u2014 was the tentative first step of what became a friendship between Moran and Wang, and is now a family. Late last year, they moved in together; with Luka, Wang and Damian\u2019s son, the members of this unorthodox trio have empowered one another past the shadow of grief.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cSo much in my life has been very focused on myself. Being an artist is narcissistic because you\u2019re indulging your instincts,\u201d Moran said. \u201cBut now with my family, it feels so good to be useful to other people, to have community. Music gets its potency from sharing, from having community.\u201d<\/p>\n
That chemistry became the crucial final component for Moran\u2019s \u201cMoves in the Field,\u201d<\/a> due March 29, a softhearted but steel-skinned set of 10 piano pieces that are as rapturous as a waterfall or as delicate as vapor. Her first album in six years, it is the redemptive conclusion in an extended span of personal tragedy and professional doubt, all ingrained in its sweeping songs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Moran stumbled into her breakthrough, \u201cUltraviolet\u201d from 2018, during an acid trip while house-sitting for her parents. She had been wrestling with a difficult commission for the toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan<\/a> and needed time out of mind. She swallowed three hits disguised as SweeTarts and romped outside through the woods, and then sat down at her childhood piano \u2014 prepared<\/a> with screws and bolts interspersed among its strings, in the simplified spirit of John Cage, so the notes would have mechanical attack but also seem to float.<\/p>\n \u201cI had been so stressed, but this allowed me to flow,\u201d Moran said, her silver makeup and Smashing Pumpkins shirt sparkling in the studio light. \u201cMy brain was organizing musical information in a completely different way. I\u2019d finish a piece, laugh hysterically, and do another one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those improvisations catalyzed Moran\u2019s career, earning her a deal with the electronic label Warp and making her a rising experimental star. The ecstatic inquisitiveness and anxious honesty of \u201cUltraviolet\u201d helped introduce the prepared piano to new audiences. In 2019, she even joined FKA twigs\u2019s acoustic band<\/a>.<\/p>\n Moran was first paid to play when she was 11 as the accompanist for a hometown vocal instructor, and it made her realize her calling as a professional musician. After studying piano and composition in Michigan and California, she returned to New York and strung together gigs as a dance accompanist while playing in rock bands (including Voice Coils<\/a>, alongside Mitski<\/a>) and investing in the city\u2019s burgeoning noise and metal scenes. (\u201cBlack metal is just Minimalism for guitars,\u201d she said at one point, laughing.)<\/p>\n With the acclaim of \u201cUltraviolet,\u201d though, Moran was now jet-setting across the globe, playing major festivals by day and dancing to techno by night. She hoped to funnel the pops and plinks of her prepared piano into uncanny dance tracks, its idiosyncrasies radiating inside rhythmic loops. \u201cI wanted to have something people could move to,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But early in 2020, Moran realized she was stuck, personally and musically. Anticipating another year of touring, she bailed on her Brooklyn apartment and moved in with her mother as her parents were preparing to divorce. The pandemic (and as a result, little income) meant she\u2019d be staying. As a child, Moran\u2019s relationship with her mother was fraught, so the piano had become not only a harbor but her way to be heard.<\/p>\n Was the prepared piano, though, forsaking her? She cut a poignant cover of Aphex Twin\u2019s \u201cAvril 14\u201d with it that went viral during early pandemic days<\/a>. But Moran had tried dropping acid and sliding onto its bench again in early 2020, only to realize lysergic lightning might not strike twice. \u201cI remember being at my piano again, like, \u2018All right, when\u2019s the genius going to kick in?\u2019\u201d she said, laughing. \u201cIt taught me that taking a drug is not going to be the thing that gets the masterwork out of you. I was going to have to work really hard.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The realization coincided with a special delivery from Yamaha \u2014 an upright Disklavier, a cyborg piano that is wired to play itself from memory or from a laptop\u2019s input that a pianist can simultaneously play. As pandemic isolation escalated, Moran swooned over the loan, which allowed her to communicate with another musician: a computer-driven manifestation of herself. Since high school, being a pianist or<\/em> a composer had driven her career; the Disklavier allowed her to be both.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her pieces reflected recent trials \u2014 being sequestered with her mother, her parents\u2019 split, a close friend\u2019s cancer diagnosis. But as she started to commute to Yamaha\u2019s Manhattan studio to begin actually recording with a more powerful Disklavier, she fretted that the machine\u2019s perfection was overriding the work\u2019s humanity, its tender center. She teased the arrangements for the better part of what proved to be a tragic and surreal year. Damian died. She made those mixtapes. And it slowly became clear that Wang was more than a late ex\u2019s widow, but a new best friend.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just got to be, like, normal<\/em> friends,\u201d Wang said, recalling the delightful daytime rave that cemented their bond. \u201cI don\u2019t think of her as Damian\u2019s ex often because that\u2019s not what she was when we met. It hasn\u2019t been the crux of our relationship for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n In the heat of the summer, Moran would sometimes string together sleepless days at Yamaha\u2019s studios. She started recording again as autumn began, having mastered how to make the Disklavier sound more human and how to hear it like an interior map, the piano another confidant. \u201cIt\u2019s OK to Disappear\u201d connects declarative chords with furtive piano runs that conjure a quickened pulse, reflecting Moran\u2019s dueling social enthusiasm and introversion. Written for two pianos, \u201cDon\u2019t Trust Mirrors\u201d is a tug of war where self-confidence and self-doubt drag one another into an ouroboros.<\/p>\n \u201cI would sit back at the Disklavier and hear my emotions reflected back at me,\u201d Moran said. \u201cI realized I needed to put that into the instrument, what I was feeling. Maybe it would heal me.\u201d<\/p>\n By Halloween 2022, Moran had finished recording \u201cMoves in the Field,\u201d happy at last with the performances\u2019 candor. As she and Wang plotted their move, they walked around Park Slope with Luka, then 15 months old, dressed as the Squatting Slav meme<\/a> for his late father\u2019s Slavic family. (Moran and Wang went as Pussy Riot.) Each time a stranger handed Luka candy, he gave them one in return. Moran remembers Wang smiling: \u201cThis is amazing. It\u2019s like living again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Moran treasured the phrase. Two months later, it returned to her as she wrote her first professional string quartet for an English ensemble. She\u2019d met Damian in their high school orchestra\u2019s string section. She called it \u201cLiving Again,\u201d dedicated it to him and began with a cello, his instrument. That first movement, Moran said, felt like watching his soul floating away, making space for what was to come.<\/p>\n Not long after \u201cLiving Again\u201d premiered, Halloween returned. Moran was living with Wang and Luka. They were a family now, traipsing around Park Slope dressed as a unified trio: rock, paper and scissors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n