Posts Tagged ‘Kali Malone’

Watch: ‘Heavy with Fruit’ by Kali Malone

Posted: 1 September 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Burning Song is the new release from Kali Malone and the first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long. The album arrives via Ideologic Organ on October 30th and is previewed with today’s single and video for the song ‘Heavy with Fruit.’

Music that hovers in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Moving through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, Burning Song represents a transformation in Malone’s compositional strategy towards a process that is more 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. 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.

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Across the album, 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.

The metaphor of burning holds two meanings. Fire moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment, and relentlessly insistent. Here, Malone moves from harnessing the fractaline beauty of mathematics to reveling in the impact of feelings, of foresight, of something more undefined and from within. But burning is a process of change in which transformation spreads from a nexus point to rapidly consume whatever it encounters. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.

Live dates 2026/2027

Wed. Sept. 23 – Lisbon, PT @ Culgurest *
Sat. Sept. 26 – Cologne, DE @ St. Gertrud [Brutalism] *
Sun. Oct. 11 – Bern, CH @ Berner Münster [bee-flat] ^
Sun. Nov. 29 – Bratislava, SK @ Novy evanjelicky kostol [NEXT Festival] ^
Thu. Jan. 28 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Fri. Jan. 29 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Sun. Jan. 31 – Vernier, CH @ Madeleine Chapel – Espace de la Madeleine [Festival Antigel] #

* = Electronic set
^ = Solo organ set
# = Burning Song set
Plus more to follow

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Photo: Kingsley Ifil

Stephen O’Malley – Spheres Collapser

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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XKatedral / La Becque Editions – 27th February 2027

Christopher Nosnibor

Not content with the completion of the first new Sunn O))) album since 2014, set for release in the spring on Sub Pop, co-founder Stephen O’Malley has been busy working on a new solo album, which will appear as a rather more low-key (if not necessarily low-frequency) release a couple of months before. Historically, one might have expected this release to have been put out through Ideologic Organ, but then again, when it comes to his solo and collaborative releases, O’Malley operates very much with within the milieu of the experimental artists and labels based in mainland Europe, as his collaboration with François J Bonnet, released in 2021 on Editions Mego evidences.

And while this is billed as an O’Malley solo album, this too is a collaborative work, featuring as it does ‘two long-form compositions for pipe organ by Stephen O’Malley, which he performs alongside the celebrated organist Kali Malone and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary)’.

There is something grand and powerful about the pipe organ, the sound of which is capable of stirring something – if not primal, then deep-seated in the emotional psyche. Creating a vast, reverberating sound, it’s capable of triggering something beyond verbal articulation. And for this release, O’Malley found some remarkable organs, and around Christmas 2021 recorded some immense drones on Les Grandes Orgues (Scherrer (1777), Walker (1867), Kuhn (1995)) at Église Saint-François, Lausanne, Switzerland. It seems that this album emerged as a detour from another project, but why not make the most of a recording opportunity?

And so it is that Spheres Collapser consists of two longform pieces, each around twenty-five minutes in length, whereby little happens beyond textural and tonal shifts. It drags heavy, an does so without apology. Rightly do: why should there be any concession here?

There are sounds which are immediately identifiable as emanating from a pipe organ, and then again there are others, which are not always immediately apparent on Spheres Collapser: instead, there is simply the sound of low, swelling, drone. The organ-led nature of the recording only becomes apparent to the ear midway through ‘Phase I Organ’, when the trilling, tremulous tones come to the fore. Twenty minutes in, there are treblesome quiverings which begin to trouble the earsdrums as the sound narrows and becomes more niggling in its nature. But the exploratory nature of this album is what it’s all about, and O’Malley is truly a master when it comes to drawing different kinds of drone from instruments.

‘Phase II Organ’ presents twenty-two minutes of continuous drone, which commences low, resonant, with a comparatively pacey undulation, before a bassier note enters the mix. But still that low drone continues on… and on… and on… Some may pin this as Sunn O))) but on organ, and that summary wouldn’t be entirely wide of the mark. What else would you expect, really? And then the track simply drones out to the end.

What to say of this release? Drones are what they are: immersive, the sound of freedom, in a sense. The sound of escapism, of freedom, of breaking free of the constraints of the now. Spheres Collapser is heavy, dense, suffocating. You feel the air seep front your lungs as the notes merge in a thick, penetrating polyphony, ultimately tapering to a single sustain which feels like an eternity. Somehow, it’s strangely draining, but exhilarating at the same time.

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