- Minimalist in the biggest sense of the word, stretched across organ, brass and voice.
- 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, blowing them up to tremendous scale—which makes the stark differences between the different instrumentation and arrangements on her latest outing, All Life Long, plain as day. Malone confronts the listener to consider the organic and mechanical constrictions of the hardware being used to create sound, in this case wind, flesh, steel pipes and brass horns.
The title track is a slow, hypnotic meditation when wheezed out of an organ but comes across as spellbindingly different when sung by the choral group Macadam Ensemble. The latter version is aided by lyrics from The Crying Water, a ghostly 1901 poem by Arthur Symons, which explores the circle of life and is steeped in mourning. All Life Long is a Music In Twelve Parts-style collection of compositional work scored by Malone for organ, voice and brass. Macadam Ensemble's vocals are mesmerising on tracks "Passage Through The Spheres" and "Slow of Faith," where androgynous voices alternate between the octaves in a dichotomy of deep tones and brilliant shining timbres. These sounds flicker like candle light projecting huge shadows onto the walls of an ancient stone cathedral.
This is Malone's first public outing with the organ since 2019's breakthrough LP The Sacrificial Code, and here four ancient-sounding organs are played by Malone and her partner Stephen O'Malley. "No Sun To Burn" sounds ornate and stately when performed on brass supplied by Anima Brass, like music fitting to accompany a royal procession, or a celebration of something grand. The organ version, on the other hand, is sombre and mechanical, like the soft, poignant feeling of attending an actual funeral.
Malone is massively popular. Bizarrely so for a drone artist. Why is that? For one, her music has a gloriously unpolished and gothic feel that speaks to people on a human level, resisting the rigorous world of concert halls and academia. She has been compared to Philip Glass in these pages before, and rightly so. She's a minimalist in the biggest sense of the word. Fans of hers will be enamoured by her dedication to the craft of composition for different instruments across these 78 minutes, and the real freaks can nerd out on the harmonic theory that will wash right over most ears on this divinely sequenced record. You don't need to be educated to enjoy Malone's music: it's emotive, world-building and all-encompassing. The beauty lies within that. Like Glass, her ability to draw the listener into ecstasy through repetition is one of her greatest strengths—something much easier said than done.
Tracklist01. Passage Through the Spheres
02. All Life Long (for organ)
03. No Sun to Burn (for brass)
04. Prisoned on Watery Shore
05. Retrograde Canon
06. Slow of Faith
07. Fastened Maze
08. No Sun To Burn (for organ)
09. All Life Long (for voice)
10. Moving Forward
11. Formation Flight
12. The Unification of Inner & Outer Life