It’s often difficult for pianists to avoid playing a synthesiser keyboard like a piano. Michelle Moeller studied classical piano to a high level, but while completing a degree in composition at Mills College in Oakland, California, she came under the spell of two electronically inclined mentors, Zeena Parkins and John Bischoff, and became obsessed with synth technology. In order to “turn off her piano-player brain” and concentrate on timbre, Moeller started to use Max/MSP interfaces rather than keyboards to generate synth sounds. The results are startling. Artificial noises sparkle and flutter in the higher register and toll like church bells in the lower register. She creates warped, ethereal, space-age noises that are complex of timbre and harmony.
Late Morning, her debut album, features some piano-dominated tracks: Nest is a superb, jazzy meditation, using Erik Satie-like parallel harmonies, while Corridor is a pulsating piece of clockwork minimalism in 5/4, where Moeller’s piano is accompanied by the low-key textural percussion of Willie Winant and Wesley Powell. But the most sonically adventurous moments here pair Moeller’s pianistic virtuosity with her interest in synth technology and manipulated sounds. On the wonderfully woozy Leafless, her prepared piano – presumably treated with paperclips and bolts to create muffled harmonics – is further mutilated until it sounds like the instrument is melting. Sift’s bell-like chorus is topped by tightly harmonised shakuhachi-style improvisations by Mitch Stahlmann (reminiscent of André 3000’s recent flute album). On Slate, her creaky prepared piano takes its place among a symphony of distorted electronic glitches and chirrups. A thrilling and disorientating LP.
Also out this month
Moves in the Field (Warp) is the first album in six years from the New York composer Kelly Moran, and her first for a new label. Multitracked on a Yamaha Disklavier player piano, her Philip Glass-like repetitions could easily have sounded cold and mechanical, but she makes them joyous, uncluttered and minty-fresh. Montreal-based Swedish artist Erika Angell is best known for making oddball jazz and electronica with Thus Owls and the Moth, but her solo debut album The Obsession With Her Voice (Constellation) is an eerie, vocal-led gothic song-cycle, like a Laurie Anderson installation taken into operatic territory, laced with Patti Smith-style stream-of-consciousness poetry. Israeli-American cellist Maya Beiser is the latest musician to re-create Terry Riley’s In C (released on Islandia Music Records), layering her cello to form an ecstatic, hypnotic piece of minimalism with sacred overtones.
