Pre-Order 30/10/26 - Malone, Kali: Burning Song

This item is available for pre-order only and will be dispatched on or around its release date (30/10/26)

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. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of reflection and unwavering tenderness.

Still, the creation of that music, Malone’s own experience of it in performance, has been one defined by focus and rigour, by adherence to structures that dictate cyclical returns and the detailed work of exploring microtonal harmony. 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.

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. Feeling supersedes matrices, and each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. The album 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.

She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed 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. Recording took place over the course of two late nights in August 2025, with the engineer Francesco Donadello placing over 20 microphones throughout the room and closely upon the instruments, allowing the listener to locate themselves within the music as it fills the historic sanctum.

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.

Even with the presence of one of the most canonized and dissected composers of all time just underfoot, Malone felt the pressure of tradition lifting, an ease of being dictating the flow of the music. She is careful to never extend the narratives of any individual piece beyond what feels conclusive, resulting in a relatively compact cycle of compositions.

1. Grieving Figure
2. Map the Path
3. Bells on a Branch
4. Crawling Ashore
5. Sounding a Void
6. Heavy With Fruit
7. My Eve My Dawn