The record’s five earliest pieces (the first four tracks, plus “Reappearing”) date from 2019 and 2020, when Moran wanted to take the prepared piano to the dancefloor. It’s easy to imagine album opener “Echo in the Field” blasting out over a late-night festival stage: A repeating synth line introduces buzzing bass chords, with the chiming piano carrying a clear melody over the top. Don’t Trust Mirrors isn’t really a dance record, though, and this club-friendly feel disappears quickly as Moran focuses on the timbral character of the prepared piano. “Prism drift” and “Sans sodalis” are built on spacious, ringing harmonics, not likely to move bodies, but to leave them stock-still and blissfully overwhelmed. These versions were later reworked into their more subdued partners, “Hypno” and “Sodalis (II),” for Moves in the Field, and their effect here is like seeing a familiar stage play shot in IMAX, with small, expressive gestures made grandly cinematic.
In the second half of Don’t Trust Mirrors, Moran largely works in the opposite direction, translating those songs written for Disklavier into pieces for prepared piano and synth. These tracks stand out from their originals through textural variety rather than compositional complexity. “Systems,” for example, is recognizable as Moves in the Field’s “Superhuman,” but it finds new force in the prepared piano’s clanging strings. At times, it sounds more like gamelan and with a bit of subtle synth, it becomes quietly sinister. The more variable sound of Moran’s electronics can completely alter a track, too: “Leitmotif,” a delicate little thing that unfurls like a rose petal on Moves in the Field, is big and airy and resonant as “Cathedral,” with tinkling notes spilling into an ambient wash of synth and disappearing in the cavernous distance.
Companion albums are nothing new for Moran, who released the improvisatory rush that became Ultraviolet later, unedited, as the Origin EP. But the relationship between Don’t Trust Mirrors and its predecessor is different, more involved, and ultimately more illuminating: Neither of these albums could exist without the other; neither is a first draft, though they each started where the other left off. Hold them up next to each other and you can see Moran reflected more accurately than in either: a picture of the artist becoming herself.
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