Kali Malone: shorter pieces, faster turns

Burning Song is the first Kali Malone album that ends before you have settled into it, and that is the argument. Seven pieces on the pipe organ at Thomaskirche in Leipzig, none of them past seven minutes, and the mood turns while you are still standing in the previous one. Her earlier records asked for an hour and paid you back slowly. This one keeps moving.

Malone is American-born and based in Stockholm. She has spent a decade making the case that the pipe organ is a drone instrument before it is a church instrument: Tragic Chorus in 2016, Cast of Mind in 2018, The Sacrificial Code in 2019, then Living Torch, Does Spring Hide Its Joy, All Life Long, Magnetism and, earlier this year, Music for Intersecting Planes. Those records ran long and tuned microtonally, and they needed you to sit still before anything shifted. Here the tuning work is still underneath, but the pieces are short enough that the changes arrive while you are listening rather than after you have stopped.

She recorded it inside the building, on the Bach organ. Thomaskirche is the Lutheran church in Leipzig where J.S. Bach was music director in his final years and where he is buried under the altar. Francesco Donadello recorded and mixed, Samuel L. Schwenk assisted, Matt Colton mastered. Lucy Railton plays cello and Stephen O'Malley, Malone's husband, plays bowed acoustic guitar. Ideologic Organ released it on November 2. The title promises songs and the record contains none, which is the joke it makes about itself.

The room is the second instrument. The organ holds a chord and the church keeps holding it after the keys come up, so the decay is part of the structure. Against that, the cello and the bowed guitar read as grain rather than melody. The tracklist does not say which piece carries which guest, and several listens did not settle it for me. What you hear is a change in the surface, something rougher entering the clean tone and passing through it.

Grieving Figure opens by drifting in. There is no first statement, just a slow arrival, and the piece is nearly done before you notice it has a shape. Map The Path is the shortest thing here at 4:26, and it spends the time the way a short piece has to: the idea stated, held, released. Bells On A Branch does the connective work, holding the middle of the first half while the tuning shifts under it. Crawling Ashore leaves the most room to decay between moves, and the melancholy is least defended there.

The back half tightens. Sounding A Void sounds like a method being tested rather than a mood being built. Heavy With Fruit, the penultimate track, has a video that sets the music against ocean and flame, blunt for a record this restrained, though the pairing holds. My Eve My Dawn closes at the longest runtime and earns the placement: the pedal is finally left alone and the building answers. The subject, as far as a record of drones has one, is whatever the listener walks in carrying. Here that is drama and melancholy, and both are audible.

It is for anyone who wanted The Sacrificial Code and could not give it the hour, and for anyone who has never tried her at all. It sits next to late organ works and next to Sunn O))) without flinching from either. If what you want is one long tone to reorganise your afternoon, this is not that record and it will not pretend to be.

Compression costs something. Two pieces end while the church is still ringing, and the shorter of them reads as a sketch of something she would once have taken twice the time to build. Malone's method has always been about what patience produces, and cutting to the shape of an idea is a wager that the idea survives without the wait. Mostly it does. On Sounding A Void it does not quite. A record that trades length for nerve and comes out ahead, then. The organ is still going when the last piece stops.

The tracklist

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