Malone, Kali : Burning Song

Burning Song, composer and organist Kali Malone’s first new album since 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is intuitive and direct.

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.

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

“Command[s] acute attention… solemn yet startlingly direct for Malone, feeling for the first time as if she’s lifting her fingers from the keys and shaking the listener by the shoulders. ”
THE GUARDIAN - ★★★★★
review in the Film and Music supplement (30th Oct)

"less pieces of music than three-dimensional experiences… Close listeners should note that here, Malone is moving away from the mathematical and canonical underpinnings of her earlier work. Her freer hand makes for emotional listening, with this often sombre artist’s tones turning dreamy and resolved by the final track, My Eve My Dawn."
THE OBSERVER - review (1 Nov)

“The result is, in a word, auratic: radiating dissonances that march and melt with a stately sense of their own ephemerality…Resisting the formality of canon in the room where technique reached its most ecstatic heights, Malone instead revels in the directional, time-bound poetics of emergence and decay.”
THE WIRE - review (Nov issue)

“”Sounding A Void” and closer “My Eye My Dawn” are lovely examples of her method: stately chord progressions suggesting warm and slowly unfolding drama."
UNCUT - 8/10 review (issue out in October)