Donor Lens - Desire Path
Desire Path
Donor Lens
Single
Electronic
Liam Murphy
May 6, 2022
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Recently, after returning from a brief European tour, Kelly Moran posted a video that showed she was back to what she does best. Her playing a piano with a bitcrusher layered over the top.
The clip is a brief introduction to the kind of sound and methodology the artist approaches in her music. She is, in her own words, taking the piano to strange sonic worlds.
Those who want the full experience must delve into the folds of Don’t Trust Mirrors. A pair with the previous album, Moves in the Field, the two are sonically different but inseparable. Its dazzling melodies and intricate movements are shaped by Kelly’s penchant for experimentation, feeding notes and sequences into her futuristic player piano (called a disklavier), as well as painstaking layering that gives rise to beautiful tapestries, a symbiosis of decon club and neoclassical.
We caught up with Kelly while she took some time between tours (she’ll be playing Europe and the UK again in February, including a two-day residency at Cafe OTO) to ask more about this new album in the run-up to its vinyl and CD release in the new year. We also discuss making piano music in the sample-pack era and what it was like to play some of Oneohtrix Point Never’s most intricate tracks.
You’ve just come back from a mini Europe tour is that right?
Yeah, I have five dates in Europe. Greece, Poland, and the UK.
How did you find it?
It was interesting. My shows in Greece and Poland were really fantastic because I got to play on a real piano. I have another setup where I do a keyboard set, but that's more electronic, which I love doing, but it's more stress for me. I feel like I have less control over the elements I'm working with. I just prefer the piano.
So, Don't Trust Mirrors, I know that it was somewhat created in conjunction with the Moves in the Field. I'm wondering what was the first trace of what then became this new album?
Basically, I started writing the first four tracks of Don't Trust Mirrors, plus the track Reappearing. Those I wrote in 2019 and 2020. I wanted to write something that was just a little bit more upbeat and loop-based because Ultraviolet was so improvisatory and sprawling.
I wanted to make something that I could move to and that other people could move to. I started writing these tracks with that thought in mind. Reappearing, actually, I initially wrote that for a fashion collaboration. It was for a Mulberry ad.
But yeah, I had started on this path. Then when COVID hit and I was just trapped in my house. Everything just felt so familiar to me. It was like, I'm in my room with my piano that I've been working with for the last few years. It just felt like I needed to do something totally different to refresh myself creatively.
I had a disklavier in my home that I had actually used to write the track Don't Trust Mirrors, because initially that track started as a two-piano piece for myself and the composer, Missy Mazzoli.
Yamaha had loaned me a disklavier, specifically just for this collaboration. Then when COVID hit, they were like: “You can just hold on to that.”
At the same time, Warp said to me, “No rush on your next album.”
That was basically when I was like, Okay, I guess I'm going to go on a side quest with this piano.
I took the MIDI files that I had been using for San Sodalis, and then I basically I fed them to the player piano. I took this track that initially was for electronics and prepared piano and had these interlocking melodies all bouncing around. Then what I did is I condensed all of them into a MIDI file and put it in to the disklavier. I basically dove headfirst into the disklavier land.
The disklavier is interesting. Sort of a digitised version of old-fashioned automation.
It was crazy. One of the funnest things I did was I connected my synth to the piano. I have a Prophet. I have a Prophet 12. At one point, I turned on the arpeggiator function, and I just held a chord on the synth. Then I looked at the piano and it was just sending this super fast arpeggiated pattern just off the piano. That was actually how I wrote my song Superhuman because it was like I held a chord on the synth, and then it just sent this superhuman. I could never play. It was just this crazy arpeggio just up the piano over and over and over. I was just like, Okay, I'm going to loop that.
There are a lot more electronic elements on this album than on the last one. I also recently saw you back in the studio, layering bitcrusher over your piano. Do you see adding an electronic layer over a piano as a kind of interjection or interruption of the purity of organic instrumentation?
That's a funny word. I love it. That's actually such a fun word to describe. Yeah, you know what? Here's the thing, the sound of pure piano has been perfected by Bach, and Chopin, and Debussy, and all these other composers. There's no shortage of pure-toned piano music. To me, it's no different than being like, does a piano trio with violin and clarinet, does that corrupt the sound?
To me, it's just another way of putting the piano in a different sonic world. Honestly, I feel like that's what made me so interested in extended piano techniques because it just felt like, Oh, here's a way to take the sound of the piano and elevate it, or just find your own way with it.
For me, I just love the sound of a bitcrusher so much. I don't know why. It's one of my favourite sounds in the world.
I think one of my goals for my next project is to keep perfecting, maybe even more sensitively, develop my relationship with putting other sounds with the piano. I want to keep refining that and make it even more delicate and sophisticated because I do love to have a heavy electronic wash of textures with the piano. Yeah, Yeah.
I'm wondering if we can zoom in on Lunar Wave. It has a very striking roll of chords, and is – as the title suggests – quite cosmic.
That track in particular, the origin of that music started with the song Solar Flare on Moves in the Field. That track, its origin was as a piano piece. I think for that specific piano piece, I was definitely inspired by the composer, John Luther Adams. I'm really into his work, especially his piano music. A couple of his tracks, he has this… Actually, I'm just going to realise how much I accidentally ripped him off. He has this song called Dark Waves.
I'm not the first person to make that a wave of the ocean music can also feel like a wave of the ocean.
No, I think you'd get away with that.
Can I get away with it? I really love his music. I always wanted to make a track that really felt like it was very organic and oceanic, or like the song says, a solar flare, like something unfurling. Something really deep and big unfurling. Initially, when I wrote that track, I wrote these, what I consider to be these very open… I think they're nine chords on the piano, but it's very open.
Then what I have happening is these very delicate tremolos that creep in from the upper end of the piano that just become these very chaotic, bubbly textures in the track. It just builds. It's this big organic wave that's just building and building.
One of the things that I did when I made Moves in the Field is I went really crazy with recording discrete MIDI layers. Part of the reason why I was so excited to turn these into electronic tracks was because I had so many discrete tracks, and I thought I can really orchestrate this in a very intricate way and take all these MIDI lines that were meant for a piano, and I’ll send this one to this synth. I’ll send this one to a piano texture. It really gave me a lot of flexibility with taking these files and finding different sounds for them to just make something that felt very deep and wavy.
You can really manipulate it in any way that you want.
So then I end up making two albums that sound completely different from each other, in my opinion.
I was worried about Lunar Wave because I was like… Initially, I had intended for this record to be a little bit more upbeat and dancy. I was trying to make a clubby record, and I just couldn't. The path took me elsewhere.
A lot of electronic music today is focused on sample packs and chord packs. There can be musicality to how you blend certain elements, but some of the time, it can feel like musicality is the part that you skip.
As someone who puts musicality at the forefront, how do you see yourself in that environment?
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, there are, I think, those things can be... People can use those sample packs and stuff like that as shortcuts. But I think at the end of the day, it’s really just about your taste and how well you put things together. Because I’ve made music that’s very organic, where it’s like I’m playing the piano and I’m really playing everything into it, but it can still be an uncoordinated mess and maybe not that musically effective.
It’s really just how true you are to your feelings and how you’re putting something together. But I will say, personally, I’m very stubborn. For me, the labour and the work are a very necessary part of the creative process.
One of my friends said, “Oh, my God, you should totally feed your stems. You should make a folder of all your melodies, a folder of all your chord progressions, a folder of all your basslines, and you should feed it to AI.
Then AI is going to be able to help you write music, and it’s going to learn how you compose, and it’s going to help you generate music.” I was like… I don’t want to do that because that’s cheating to me.
I would feel like such a fraud presenting something that I didn't actually write. That's crazy. That's just not what music is for me. For me, toiling through the process and working through things is such an essential part of the work for me.
I have followed your campaigning on the subject of Tate McRae. In a clip of you speaking about her, you mention “writing music to perform to”. When you're writing the music, does performance come into your mind at all?
I think, usually, it doesn't. I actually... It usually comes... Unless I'm writing a solo piano piece, that's different because then it's just like that's just happening in real-time. I feel like I'm usually not thinking about performance. Performance is usually something that I have to decode after I create something.
Even when I made Moves in the Field because I was recording so many layers, when it came time to figure out, I was like, Okay, which part am I taking and which part is the piano going to take? What makes the most sense? A lot of the times, it's like you make a piece of music and then you figure out after the fact what makes the most sense, what's the most playable part, what's the part that makes sense to interface with electronically. A lot of times I figure that out after the fact.
How would a Kelly Moran/Tate McRae collab sound?
I would love to just play. I would love to just riff on a pop song or make a chord progression, or I would love to just do a melody or something with her. She has a really distinct style of singing. She really sounds like a pop star that’s very influenced by trap music because she does a lot of triplets and just beats that she works with. I would like to just fit into her world because she has a very distinctive songwriting style.
I was talking to this writer, Larry Fitzmaurice, about it, and he was like, I was watching this movie, Smile. This song popped up with someone else singing it. He was like, Wow, this really sounds like a Tate McRae song. And then he looks it up, and Tate McRae was one of the co-writers. And he was like, That’s impressive when someone in the pop landscape is only 22 and actually has their own style.
The first time I heard of you was when you played piano for Oneohtrix Point Never’s Myriad tour. I remember watching you play Chrome Country live and being really astounded by it. What was that tour like?
That was really fun. That was the process of putting together those performances was very complex because those songs are very multi-layered. Dan [Lopatin] made this album, and then we, as the performers, we all got in a room together and we would look at the studio session for an individual track.
We'd look at all the parts, and we'd be like, Okay, I'll take… For me, my role in that band was to play the majority of the melodies, all the most keyboard-y type stuff. That was my role. Play the melodies. We would listen to it, and anytime there was the melody or that main section, I'd be like, Okay, that's the part I'm going to take.
I'm going to go transcribe that and learn how to play it. Then Aaron David Ross, who was another band member, was really good at doing textural synth stuff. He would be isolating the synth tracks and being like, Okay, I'm going to recreate that. Then Eli Kezsler, the drummer, if there was a percussive element, that would be him.
I learned a lot, though. That was a really big learning experience for me being on that tour, because the shows were so complex and there was so much backline. It made me realise just how much of a production these shows that you see at festivals are, how many people are involved, and how much manpower it takes, and how expensive it is. It made me realise. Oh, I want to be able to have a super visual and high-impactful show, but I want to try to do it in a way that I don’t need 20 people on the road, where I can actually make a profit from my shows. It was a big learning experience. I took my experience with that tour, and it’s definitely informed the way that I designed my own live shows and my own live sites.
I’ll say it again, it was really incredible.
I feel that way about when I played Boring Angel because I had to play all the time. And I was just like, damn, I did that. That's crazy.
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