All Life Long

Description

Kali Malone's new album, All Life Long, is a collection of music for organ, choir, and brass composed by Kali between 2020 and 2023. Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that bring out latent emotional resonances. In her hands, the experimental reinterpretations of century-old methods of polyphonic composition become gateways to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Although it has an impressive scope, Kali's music is especially remarkable for the intimacy it evokes. Her new album features her first compositions for organ since the album The Sacrificial Code, released in 2019, as well as interdependent pieces for voice and brass performed by the Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Throughout the twelve pieces, themes and harmonic motifs recur, presented in altered forms. Driven by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, her compositions for choir and brass acquire expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work. Meanwhile, the organ works, performed by Kali with the occasional accompaniment of Stephen O'Malley on four organs dating from the 15th to the 17th century, highlight the power and spectral potential that these rigorous operations can achieve.