Kelly Moran’s original “Sodalis” — a contribution to the 2020 Field Works Ultrasonic collection — was an anxious churn of wings; a horde of grasshoppers scattering in long grass, a flurry of pigeons crashing against blinding sunlight.
“Sodalis (II),” a reimagining of the 2020 track and the second single from the composer’s forthcoming Moves In the Field, shifts instead like water. Not a babbling brook or the collapsing sheets of a waterfall, but the sort of night-blue currents that crawl and eddy on the ocean floor. Performed on Moran’s Yamaha Disklavier — a piano that plays back on its own, creating densely layered duets with just two hands — “Sodalis (II)” is lush with patience, a stately instrumental that feels like being subsumed in icy water. Rather than shock the breath from your body, however, Moran’s song makes you all the more aware of the warmth that lives inside you.
Traced with some of the bittersweet delicacy of Aphex Twins’ “Avril 14th,” Moran’s latest is difficult to swim away from — it’s easy to imagine letting it play on forever, staring at the world through its glassy telescope of blue.
