Bloodroot - Kelly Moran (2017)

Highly Recommended

Bloodroot isn't a prepared piano record per se - the prepared piano sounds are sampled and loaded into MIDI controllers so Moran has access to them through her synthesizer - but unlike, say, Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote player piano rolls to execute piano compositions that humans couldn't play, Moran uses the samples to have her prepared piano vocabulary at her fingertips, and to extend that vocabulary (but always within the context of the composition!) by mixing the prepared piano sounds with straight piano sounds. It also allows her to do things that would require a second set of hands, like using an ebow whilst playing prepared/straight piano on some of the same notes.*

tl:dr; All of this is a way of saying that this is a prepared piano record, even if not technically a prepared piano record. As such, it is most obviously compared to John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano . . . and while that may seem too easy, it also happens to be fair & useful. Given the stature of Sonatas and Interludes, it is a tribute to Moran that she is produce an album that stands up to Cage's masterwork.

Circa 2017, prepared piano is not the novelty it was when Cage first started toying with it in the late 1930s, even if it is not exactly commonplace. The thing that makes Sonatas and Interludes transcendent is that, once you get past the technical innovation, it is composition itself that really makes it immortal. In the same way, above and beyond Moran's technical vision, the composition is what carries Bloodroot. 

The thing that really makes Sonatas and Interludes shine is the way that pianist Maro Ajemian (to whom Cage dedicates the work) finds the Satie at the core of Cage's compositions**: the archness, the asceticism, the playfulness, the obstinance, the longing . . . the soul, if you will indulge the cliché. In Moran's work to you can hear echoes of Satie - I also hear Messiaen, Cowell, and Ligeti, just off the top of my head - but manages to create a work that is informed by her predecessors, not dependent upon them. And while the simple fact that it is a prepared piano work links it closely to Sonatas and Interludes, that too informs it, but does not define it. The compositions are, after the first blush of sound wears off, beautiful, varied, and unique. While Bloodroot will perhaps never fully escape the orbit of Sonatas and Interludes, it will stand up as part of the canon.

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*  Something has been made of the hybrid nature of the technology, linking it to electronic music as well as prepared piano. I think this is misleading: while electronics do show up on the treatments of some sounds, the effect is subtle and not at all like what we understand as electronic music in the avant garde classical sense.  

** I've heard other versions; Ajemian's debut of the work on Dial Records is the best version of the work by far.