Kali Malone - All Life Long

Pitchfork

Read Marc Weidenbaum’s review of the album.

Resident Advisor

As a composer, Kali Malone is a great investigator of sound. Like a scientist with a microscope, she holds a magnificent lens up to her pipe organ odysseys, blo..

A Closer Listen

Drone music in the past few years has seen a reconsideration of the formidable pipe organ. The instrument has of late been stripped of its religious trappings and recast as something capable of expressing unexpected range and versatility, a still-living resource rippling with singular tones, timbres, and temperament. Among the most prominent in the growing field of musicians developing new approaches to organ music – Sarah Davachi, Claire M. Singer, Fuji|||||||||||ta, and Eliane Radigue, to name a few – is Kali Malone.

Not to suggest that the pipe organ is the only instrument she focuses on. Malone’s work, whether written for brass, choir, keys, or guitar, is routed through her education and training in electro-acoustic music, explorations of various tuning systems, and her deployment of generative or systems-based composition.

Malone’s compositions also rely on the technical prowess of her collaborators, called on not so much for their ability to express their personalities through their instruments as for their ability to tap into and express the personalities of their instruments. While passionate playing is required to realize Malone’s ideas, so are focus, discipline, and an adherence to the rigors of long-form timing, non-standard tonal systems, and polyphonic composition.

The listening experience presented in all of Malone’s work, however, is anything but arid or academic. Whether solo or with others, she creates music of exceptional presence and beauty: commanding but never overbearing, hypnotic but never anesthetizing, magisterial but not pompous.

All of which leads to her latest work, the breakthrough All Life Long.

Hot on the heels of 2023’s resolutely epic Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which featured tracks clocking in at over an hour in length, All Life Long features a number of tracks of surprisingly brief duration, a few of them the shortest of Malone’s recorded career. With this brevity comes a newfound warmth, clarity, and brightness. Though the organ predominates on ALL, making up half of the twelve tracks, it’s the pieces for brass and chorus – some of which are alternate versions of other tracks on the album, stirring up patterns of breathtaking contrast in their wake – that make the album thrum with vitality.

One could reasonably parse the entire album strictly on its structural and technical merits, but to do so would be to lose the feeling of it. There’s the gently treading canon of “Passage Through The Spheres,” performed by the Macadam Ensemble, widening its scope in its forward passage as it takes on new voices and new depths while never becoming leaden. The contemplative “All Life Long” in its version for organ, in which Malone utilizes the organ’s endless capacity for wind-driven drone to elongate her notes, holding to them as they beat and fluctuate in place before reluctantly releasing them in a stirring long fade. Then there’s the yearning, dulcet, hard-to-recognize counterpart for voice. There’s the indomitable if world-weary stance of “No Sun to Burn (for brass),” performed by the Anima Brass Quintet, and the reedy, dazed counterpart for organ. Lastly, there’s the sweet medieval fragment of “Formation Flight” and the bleeding-out, funereal finality of “The Unification of Inner & Outer Life.”

ALL is nearly sculptural in its abundance of textures, its resonant negative spaces. Silence is as much a part of its stately totality as is sound. Yet for all its contrasts, it holds together in a kind of inevitable, organic cohesion. Nothing feels out of place. It’s that rare thing that feeds the head and the heart at the same time. It’s also the most vivid and arresting work Malone has done to date. (Damian Van Denburgh)

The Quietus

An often brandished marker of quality is something’s ability to ‘stand the test of time’. In London’s only lighthouse, up a set of creaking stairs and overlooking an Eastern meander of the Thames, a carefully coordinated composition of singing bowls has gently rung out for twenty-four years. And it is due to continue for another 976 without repetition. The vast scope of Jem Finer’s Longplayer, if it stays the course, will connect human beings across a millennia, hearing the same piece of music in subtly altered sections.

Kali Malone is another artist working with long form pieces of sound. Admittedly the durations of her creations tend to be measured in minutes and hours rather than years. Whilst this latest outing may be considered long, clocking in at seventy-eight minutes; the pieces themselves, by drone standards, are relatively short. Only two tracks creep into double figures.

And rather than looking forwards, Malone is reaching back. The album eschews the electro acoustics of recent albums Living Torch and last year’s epic Does Spring Hide Its Joy in favour of the organ dirges of breakthrough record, The Sacrificial Code. The pieces on All Life Long (with its unexpected echo of Lionel Richie) were written, performed, and recorded between 2020 and 2023. Some of them first appeared during the 2021 Variations Festival in Nantes, France, as part of a live-streamed performance by Malone and her now husband Stephen O’Malley, accompanied by the Macadam Ensemble. Their combined efforts focused on heavy-hearted, sustained notes which seemed so tied to the pandemic. Now repurposed, these carefully intoned shifts are allowed to hold court for lengthy periods. Giving us space and time to sit and consider the softly undulating nuances that creep into our attention throughout All Life Long.

In addition to her trademark organ notes, the aforementioned Macadam Ensemble also reappear. Their intertwining choral voices echo and merge, layering, separating and reframing these profoundly sombre and grand performances from the sacred into a more communal and profane usage. There’s the welcome addition of braying brass here too. The timbre of the horns initially giving a golden sheen, as if heralding a new day. Later, they return burning with melancholy.

Returning is a theme which gradually emerges over the course of the record. But Malone isn’t just returning to these pieces formed four years ago. Within the album itself she revisits tracks, replaying and reconsidering them with a different instrumental palette. With reinterpretations of earlier motifs performed in slow-motion dances by voice, brass, or organ. The combinations locking together sweetly and, occasionally, dissonantly.

There’s a weightiness to these reconsiderations. An attempt at changing the past, trying to find a different route. A forlorn ache lashing it all together. That accepting sensation that comes down the road of loss. A pensive hope held on to for long enough that it melts away. The power of these long form works is the room afforded to imprint your own interpretations, feelings, and notions upon them like Rorschach tests or perceiving shapes in clouds. Will these drones imprint the same emotions and thoughts a thousand years from now? Only time will tell.

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(Ideologic Organ)
The Stockholm-based drone artist adds choral voices to her austere organ sounds on her startling, often sorrowful sixth album

The Guardian 0

(Ideologic Organ)
Returning to the organ-playing that made her name and adding brass and vocals, the Thom Yorke-approved composer revels in the possibilities of her instruments