Halfway through writing Don’t Trust Mirrors, Kelly Moran hit a wall. By then, she was already celebrated for her mastery of the prepared piano—a technique popularized by John Cage, which she had reinvented for a new generation on 2018’s kaleidoscopic Ultraviolet. That record, inspired by LSD trips and lucid dreams, made the avant-garde feel luminous and alive. Touring Europe after its release, Moran spent her days performing early festival sets and her nights dancing until dawn. The plan for her next project seemed obvious: she would take the prepared piano out of the conservatory and onto the dancefloor.
Then the world shut down. When the pandemic hit, Moran found herself back home with her mother after her parents’ divorce. The idea of writing “clubby piano music” under those conditions suddenly felt absurd. “I was regressing the fuck out,” she recalled. “I was going to make my great techno record in my bedroom, with my mom in the next room, during a pandemic? Yeah, the inspiration just died.”
But Don’t Trust Mirrors didn’t die—it transformed. Moran took the fragments she’d written—five pieces for prepared piano and electronics—and began rewriting them for the Disklavier, a modern player piano that can replicate her own touch with mechanical precision. The shift unlocked something new: she could now “duet” with herself, exploring layers and counterpoints impossible for a single performer. The resulting set became 2023’s Moves in the Field, a dizzying collection of compositions that blurred the line between human and machine.
Only after finishing Moves in the Field did Moran circle back to Don’t Trust Mirrors, reworking those new Disklavier pieces for her original setup. The two records are mirrors of each other—reflections and refractions of the same creative pulse. Don’t Trust Mirrors is both origin and conclusion, the moment Moran lost her fascination with the prepared piano and rediscovered it through reinvention.
The first half of Don’t Trust Mirrors dates back to 2019 and 2020, when Moran still dreamed of turning the prepared piano into a dance instrument. Opener “Echo in the Field” buzzes with that energy: synths pulse, basses hum, and the piano cuts through with bright, ringing clarity. You can almost picture it reverberating across a festival stage at 2 a.m. But that club energy fades quickly. Tracks like “Prism Drift” and “Sans Sodalis” dissolve into radiant harmonics, their spaces wide and reverent. They invite stillness rather than movement, awe rather than release. Later, these same compositions were reborn as “Hypno” and “Sodalis (II)” on Moves in the Field—quieter, softer versions of the same ideas. Hearing them here feels like seeing those refined works expanded to cinematic scale, their emotional gestures writ large.
In the album’s second half, Moran reverses the process. Here, she translates the Disklavier compositions back into pieces for prepared piano and synthesizer. “Systems,” reimagined from Moves in the Field’s “Superhuman,” gains new weight in its clattering strings, its metallic resonance evoking gamelan. With faint electronic undertones, it turns quietly ominous. “Leitmotif,” once delicate and intimate, grows cavernous as “Cathedral,” its melodies blooming into an ambient wash that fades into distance.
For Moran, companion albums are nothing new. Her 2019 Origin EP was drawn from the raw improvisations that became Ultraviolet. But the relationship between Don’t Trust Mirrors and Moves in the Field runs deeper. They aren’t simply before-and-after snapshots—they’re intertwined, each feeding the other in a continuous loop. Together, they trace a complete cycle of creation, destruction, and rediscovery.
Held side by side, these records reveal something a single album could not: an artist confronting her own reflection and finding, within the distortion, the truest image of herself.
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