Kali Malone – Burning Song
Kali Malone announces her new album, Burning Song, out October 30th via Ideologic Organ and presents the video for lead single “Heavy With Fruit.”
In conjunction, she announces live dates in Europe and the UK. Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since 2024’s All Life Long, marks a transformation in her compositional approach towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. Moving through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, the music of Burning Song hovers in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives.
Burning Song was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period.
Throughout Burning Song, Malone is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection through the development of Malone’s 2023 work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. The trio moves as one through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of Malone’s organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before.
Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation in spaces defined by the aesthetics of transcendence, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. For all its grandeur, her music is elemental at its core: born of sweat, concentration, the physicality of pipes vibrating as air rushes through them, the desire to share the emotional intensity ignited with each tonal shift.
The metaphor of burning holds two meanings. Fire moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment, and relentlessly insistent. Here, Malone moves from harnessing the fractaline beauty of mathematics to reveling in the impact of feelings, of foresight, of something more undefined and from within. But burning is a process of change in which transformation spreads from a nexus point to rapidly consume whatever it encounters. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.
Kali Malone Tour Dates:
Wed. Sept. 23 – Lisbon, PT @ Culgurest *
Sat. Sept. 26 – Cologne, DE @ St. Gertrud [Brutalism] *
Sun. Oct. 11 – Bern, CH @ Berner Münster [bee-flat] ^
Sun. Nov. 29 – Bratislava, SK @ Novy evanjelicky kostol [NEXT Festival] ^
Thu. Jan. 28 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Fri. Jan. 29 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Sun. Jan. 31 – Vernier, CH @ Madeleine Chapel – Espace de la Madeleine [Festival Antigel] #
* = Electronic set
^ = Solo organ set
# = Burning Song set
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