Am 9. Februar erscheint das neue Album “All Life Long” der in Schweden lebenden Komponistin und Musikerin Kali Malone. Es enthält zwölf Kompositionen für Orgel, Chor und Bläser und wurde an verschiedenen Orten in den Jahren 2020 bis 2023 aufgenommen: Die Choralstücke wurden vom Macadam Ensemble unter Dirigenz von Etienne Ferschaud in der Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L’Immaculée-Conception in Nantes eingespielt, die Bläserparts wurden vom Quintett Anima Brass im New Yorker Bunker Studio aufgenommen, die Orgelparts stammen von Malone selbst in Zusammenarbeit mit Stephen O’Malley und entstanden an den entsprechenden Orgeln der Église Saint-François in Lausanne, des Orgelpark in Amsterdam und des Malmö Konstmuseum in der schwedischen Stadt. Es sind die ersten orgelbasierten Aufnahmen der Musikerin seit ihrem 2019 veröffentlichten Album “The Sacrificial Code”, der Titeltrack ist sowohl in einer orgelbasierten als auch in einer Vokalversion enthalten. Das Album erscheint als Doppel-LP, CD und digital bei Ideologic Organ.

“Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone’s music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages. [...] Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone’s compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O’Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve. All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony. [...] This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and its fixation on the infinite, but draws its weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime”. (Ideologic Orgon / Bandcamp)