Drone music in the past few years has seen a reconsideration of the formidable pipe organ. The instrument has of late been stripped of its religious trappings and recast as something capable of expressing unexpected range and versatility, a still-living resource rippling with singular tones, timbres, and temperament. Among the most prominent in the growing field of musicians developing new approaches to organ music – Sarah Davachi, Claire M. Singer, Fuji|||||||||||ta, and Eliane Radigue, to name a few – is Kali Malone.
Not to suggest that the pipe organ is the only instrument she focuses on. Malone’s work, whether written for brass, choir, keys, or guitar, is routed through her education and training in electro-acoustic music, explorations of various tuning systems, and her deployment of generative or systems-based composition.
Malone’s compositions also rely on the technical prowess of her collaborators, called on not so much for their ability to express their personalities through their instruments as for their ability to tap into and express the personalities of their instruments. While passionate playing is required to realize Malone’s ideas, so are focus, discipline, and an adherence to the rigors of long-form timing, non-standard tonal systems, and polyphonic composition.
The listening experience presented in all of Malone’s work, however, is anything but arid or academic. Whether solo or with others, she creates music of exceptional presence and beauty: commanding but never overbearing, hypnotic but never anesthetizing, magisterial but not pompous.
All of which leads to her latest work, the breakthrough All Life Long.
Hot on the heels of 2023’s resolutely epic Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which featured tracks clocking in at over an hour in length, All Life Long features a number of tracks of surprisingly brief duration, a few of them the shortest of Malone’s recorded career. With this brevity comes a newfound warmth, clarity, and brightness. Though the organ predominates on ALL, making up half of the twelve tracks, it’s the pieces for brass and chorus – some of which are alternate versions of other tracks on the album, stirring up patterns of breathtaking contrast in their wake – that make the album thrum with vitality.
One could reasonably parse the entire album strictly on its structural and technical merits, but to do so would be to lose the feeling of it. There’s the gently treading canon of “Passage Through The Spheres,” performed by the Macadam Ensemble, widening its scope in its forward passage as it takes on new voices and new depths while never becoming leaden. The contemplative “All Life Long” in its version for organ, in which Malone utilizes the organ’s endless capacity for wind-driven drone to elongate her notes, holding to them as they beat and fluctuate in place before reluctantly releasing them in a stirring long fade. Then there’s the yearning, dulcet, hard-to-recognize counterpart for voice. There’s the indomitable if world-weary stance of “No Sun to Burn (for brass),” performed by the Anima Brass Quintet, and the reedy, dazed counterpart for organ. Lastly, there’s the sweet medieval fragment of “Formation Flight” and the bleeding-out, funereal finality of “The Unification of Inner & Outer Life.”
ALL is nearly sculptural in its abundance of textures, its resonant negative spaces. Silence is as much a part of its stately totality as is sound. Yet for all its contrasts, it holds together in a kind of inevitable, organic cohesion. Nothing feels out of place. It’s that rare thing that feeds the head and the heart at the same time. It’s also the most vivid and arresting work Malone has done to date. (Damian Van Denburgh)
a closer listen 
Wonderful 🌺