Kali Malone: Burning Song

Kali Malone presents Burning Song, her new album for pipe organ, cello and guitar featuring Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley. The program also includes select compositions from Malone’s vast organ discography. 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. The music moves through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Feeling supersedes matrices, as each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on 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. Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of introspection and unwavering tenderness. 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.