On the 2023 album Does Spring Hide Its Joy, Stephen O’Malley, Lucy Railton, and Kali Malone elongated single chords to colossal proportions. Without regular melodic progression, the ear tends to home in on subtler shifts: slight fluctuations in the timbre of O’Malley’s guitar or the speed of Malone’s oscillators; the sound Railton’s cello makes when her bow reaches the end of its stroke and reverses course. That meditative, enveloping record leveled conventional listening tactics and invited an expansive way of negotiating with time. When change doesn’t come as expected, the present moment has a way of billowing across an infinite horizon.
Malone is a skilled synthesist, but she might be best known for her work with the pipe organ, an instrument that tends to be physically lodged inside gated institutions, difficult to access without a certain degree of finesse. Her 2019 breakthrough LP The Sacrificial Code, a collection of spacious, secular canons, liberated the instrument’s powerful tone from its weighty religious associations. On Burning Song, the Stockholm-based musician’s first new solo album since 2024’s All Life Long, Malone returns to the organ, accompanied once again by Railton and O’Malley. But compared to the majority of her work, which sprawls on the scale of landscapes, the compositions on this new record play out as finely filigreed miniatures. Melodies coil and bubble beneath her careful fingers. Not one track breaks the seven-minute mark.
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The three musicians recorded Burning Song in Leipzig, Germany, at the St. Thomas Church, where J.S. Bach’s body rests. “There’s a composer buried at the altar, not a saint,” Malone said in a recent interview. “That made it feel like a church for music.” The organ woven into the walls of the church where Bach spent decades as cantor was built in 2000, but its tuning and temperament systems were designed to be faithful to the standards of his lifetime. Malone’s compositions, however, depart from baroque forms. The historical setting of the album’s creation hardly contains it; instead, it becomes a staging ground from which Malone and her collaborators can launch their decidedly contemporary explorations.
