Kali Malone Presents Burning Song
Kali Malone presents Burning Song, her new album for pipe organ, cello and guitar featuring Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley. The program also includes select compositions from Malone’s vast organ discography.
Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. The music moves through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Feeling supersedes matrices, as each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy.
Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of introspection and unwavering tenderness. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, 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 her 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 is a composer and musician primarily working with pipe organ, chamber ensembles, and electroacoustic formats. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances; letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a space for reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods and historical tuning systems become portals to new ways of perception.
Born in 1994 in Denver, Colorado, Malone grew up studying classical vocal music while also being closely connected to adjacent underground experimental music scenes. After relocating to Sweden at age 18, she became involved with Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she had access to state-funded studios equipped with historical Buchla synthesizers and tape machines. This environment significantly expanded her practice in synthesis, tape music, and acousmatic spatial composition. From 2014 to 2019, she worked as a sound engineer at the artist-run experimental music venue Fylkingen, while simultaneously studying electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music (KMH) and interning as a pipe organ tuner. This experience profoundly shaped her musical development and deepened her interest in organ composition, historical temperaments, and just intonation. Her position between academia and experimental music not only shaped her community of collaborators, but also influenced the trajectory of her music.
As she began to gain access to organs while studying, she started adapting her electroacoustic compositional approach to the instrument. Initially conceived as a recording practice, her early organ work began circulating through releases within experimental music communities. She has since performed her music in more than 80 churches and concert halls throughout Europe and North America, often introducing contemporary secular organ music to places where it had rarely, if ever, been presented. These concerts have opened the instrument to new audiences, placing it in a radically different musical context from the liturgical and classical traditions with which it is most commonly associated.
