FEATURE:
Spotlight
Kali Malone
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I am featuring an artist…
who has released one of this year’s most interesting and wonderful albums in the form of Does Spring Hide Its Joy. It is a longform drone piece by on sine wave oscillators alongside cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley. For those new to her, Kali Malone is an American composer and organist based in Stockholm. Her works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation. Born in Denver, Colorado, this is an artist that everyone should know about. I am fairly new to Kali Malone’s work, but she is an exceptional composer and musician. I shall end with a review for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. Before I get there, I want to bring in a few interviews where we discover more about Malone and her background. In 2018, Tiny Mix Tapes spotlighted a phenomenal musician who was on the rise:
“Kali grew up in Colorado and lived there until she was 16, after which she spent time in Western Massachusetts before relocating to Stockholm in 2012. She has been there since and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in electroacoustic composition at The Royal College of Music.
So far in 2018 she has released a cassette, Organ Dirges 2016-2017 (Ascetic House), and an LP, Cast of Mind (Hallow Ground). A triple CD of organ music is coming later this year from iDEAL Recordings, as well as the debut album from her new project with Acronym and a vinyl reissue of Organ Dirges 2016-2017.
PHOTO CREDIT: A.M. Rehm
I know a bit about the music scene in Western Massachusetts, but what is happening in Colorado and Stockholm?
The music scene in Denver, Colorado has changed a lot the past few years. Mostly because Denver has been gentrifying so rapidly and the housing crisis has made a lot of people move, and it’s difficult to acquire venue spaces for underground music. Especially since the Ghost Ship tragedy, which triggered a cascade of repercussions throughout the whole country, some of our most important DIY spaces have been shut down and some of our heroes have fallen, so it’s been a really tumultuous couple of years.
But growing up there, I remember shows happening everywhere always and all extreme musics were bound into a night, so from a very early age, I was exposed to a lot of different extreme expressions. The shows were mostly all ages and happening in people’s homes or warehouses rather than in bars; it was a pretty inclusive community.
In some ways, I’ve found that sort of community in Stockholm for sure. In Stockholm, we have many shared resources and shared spaces, like state-funded studios and venues, so it’s kind of hard to avoid ending up in a community there. A lot of those are institutionalized communities, so people aren’t necessarily choosing each other, but you get a lot of diverse expressions through that also. The thinking is kind of like, “We happen to share this space together, we happen to share these resources, let’s get along and do something.”
You have Fylkingen, which is an 85-year-old artist-run society and venue for experimental music and art. And there’s EMS, a state-funded studio for electroacoustic music that houses very-well-cared-for Buchla and Serge modular systems. At these places, you’re working with many different generations of people at once, so you can really learn a lot and keep certain traditions alive. Outside of those more institutional and formal communities, my friends and I have our own studio called Tropiska Föreningen, and we put on more DIY shows and exhibitions.
Great venues in Stockholm have also shut down since I’ve been there, but that’s kind of the nature of doing underground music — nothing is ever permanent, and you always have to be working at it and readjusting to the circumstances. The minute you get too comfortable with it, you lose it. You always have to live with that anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen next, which is why it’s so important to have that community around you.
Why did you decide to stay in Sweden?
Well, I went there initially because of Ellen Arkbro. I met her in New York when I was 16 at a house show, and a year later I went to visit her in Sweden and she introduced me to EMS and Fylkingen. I started playing music with a bunch of people there, and I never wanted to leave. It was a really formative and groundbreaking experience, especially for my exposure to improvised music. When I first heard Swedish improvised music, I noticed that it was very careful and considerate of the other musicians, and it inspired a different sort of listening in me. Up until that point, when I’d played improvised music, it was a lot about taking space and blasting sound, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to articulate yet.
After that, I moved to Sweden really naively when I was 18 with just my Fender Blues guitar amp and some pedals, and I’m still there six years later.
How did you begin to play the organ?
One of my first friends in Sweden is an organist, and I would go to the church and watch him practice. But I never really thought of it as an instrument for me because, in my mind, it was still so connected to the traditions of the church; it wasn’t yet sonically liberated from that particular setting and culture for me. Then Ellen Arkbro and my other friend Marta Forsberg put on an incredible organ concert in a church, and that was kind of the first time I heard live, contemporary pieces on the organ that really resonated with me. It was inspiring, but I still wasn’t thinking “I’m going to write for organ.” But then I met the organ tuner Jan Börjeson for some research I was doing for my thesis. I’m very interested in tuning systems and temperament systems, and so I wanted to talk to an organ tuner about their experiences with that because they are often tuning in many different temperaments. I went for a 10-minute interview with him, which turned into us tuning the organ for eight hours, and now I’m his apprentice. So, I actually started playing the organ through tuning it”.
In 2020, as Kali Malone was performing as part of Re-Imagine Europe (she was commissioned by INA GRM), François Bonnet spoke with her. In this fascinating interview, we learn more about Malone’s extraordinary talent and musicianship. She is someone that you need to listen to. Hearing her music and performances is a real gift and wonderful experience:
“FB: Your music has an ‘anti-romantic’ approach. Its expression is not a musical gesture summoned by a genius but by rules and structure that help build a ‘selfless expressivity’. Had you already explored this legacy of Cage and Feldman in the US or is it something you developed in Sweden?
KM: Thanks for that interpretation, I’d say it’s a fair evaluation of some of my work. This approach grew over time while in Sweden. It’s not something I’m entirely bound to, although the more I commit to it the more difficult it is to transition to other forms of expressivity. Applying a rational and generative structure to the organisation of sound challenges my willpower and ego. It submits my chaotic nature to a discipline based on concept rather than emotion. Interestingly, the music ends up projecting something much more emotional and personal than if it had been composed without a predetermined structure.
FB: You create acoustic and electronic music. What are the differences, if any, in the approach to these two modalities?
KM: I love to combine synthesis and acoustic instruments in my work. There’s an incalculable beauty to an acoustic timbre’s organic quality and the human sensibility’s delicate obscurity. There’s also a component in the process of recording acoustic instruments that demands more commitment and clarity from my part, making the whole thing feel more humbling and significant. The idea of ‘the recording’ is quite different when I’ve set up the studio, borrowed microphones, and reserved time with live musicians than when I’m spending hours at my leisure on a new synth patch. There’s an implied scarcity and urgency in the former recorded sound, which might be why my latest works use so much acoustic material.
FB: You’re creating a new work in the context of the Re-Imagine Europe project, which you’ll present at the Sonic Acts Academy and INA GRM’s The Focus Concert Series with a loudspeaker orchestra. Will you develop something specifically for a 360-degree diffusion of your music?
KM: Yes.
I am going to move things to the present time. Bandcamp featured an interview with Kali Malone in promotion of Does Spring Hide Its Joy. I think I first heard her music last year. I have been intrigued ever since. I don’t think that there is anyone quite like her in the industry. I am really curious to see what direction she takes next, and what how she follows the sublime and immersive Does Spring Hide Its Joy:
“You give all of your trust to the music and let it guide your attention rather than anticipate what’s around every corner,” says composer Kali Malone. Malone creates drone meditations that gradually unfold through layered tones. Her latest project Does Spring Hide Its Joy presents three different versions of the finished piece, each of which blossoms from the same score.
Malone found kinship with like-minded artists Lucy Railton, a cellist she met in Sweden who was often working in the Electronic Music Studio at the same time as her, and Stephen O’Malley, a guitarist she met by chance while going through the metal detectors at Ina GRM in France. In the spring of 2020, the three artists were locked down together in Berlin. During that time, they began to make music at Berlin Funkhaus and MONOM and ended up making Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which features Malone on 72 sine wave oscillators, Railton on cello, and O’Malley on guitar.
The music on Does Spring Hide Its Joy is non-linear yet structured. Five-minute blocks link together, forming a ladder the three players move up and down; in total, the work can last anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. As the trio plays, they react to each other in real time, matching one another’s notes or falling away and leaving empty spaces. It’s about trusting each other and the process and embracing the failures that lead to successes along the way.
Much of Malone’s work employs rhythmic patterns like canons or tuning systems that guide the music in a certain direction. Within these confines, she finds space for creativity and change. “When you have a bunch of restrictions, you lose control because there’s some sort of agency that is given to the composition that you submit yourself to,” she says. “It’s a big puzzle. And then when it does fit together, the piece is so much more perplexing than I could have really imagined or linearly composed.”
The ideas Malone explores across the album, and her discography, stem from interests she’s held for a long time. She was a musical child; one of her earliest memories is of sitting at the piano, where she quickly fell in love with the sound of the black keys. But it was an experience she had conducting a piece by Pauline Oliveros at 19 that shaped her artistic trajectory. Oliveros established the practice of deep listening, breaking open new ways of actively engaging with sound and each other. The piece Malone conducted, To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe In Recognition Of Their Desperation, plays with the social dynamics of an ensemble. Through this work, Malone began thinking more about relationships that exist between each player and how you may submit your will to the collective or rebel against it.
Throughout Does Spring Hide Its Joy, the three artists each explore submission and assertion, attentively listening to see when they should play or recede. When performed live, this dynamic shapes the listening experience of the audience. Depending on the space, the piece will take on different forms: If they’re seated in different positions, they may hear different sounds from each other, and different acoustics will create different qualities of sound. For Malone, live performance is where all of the elements come together—and where deep listening thrives. “It’s the moment I can really just completely be present and in the music,” she says. “If I’m able to listen and just enter that zone, then it also opens up a doorway for the other people in the space to go there with me.”
Malone estimates the group has spent 24 hours performing the music live to audiences in 60 or 90-minute concerts. She’s met people who have seen them play it more than once and often think it’s something different. But it isn’t—it’s just that every time, there’s still something left to be unearthed. “It’s so exciting because it just keeps on giving and giving and teaching us new things,” Malone says. “I feel like it’s a musical practice rather than a piece that we can continue and that I would love to continue forever”.
Before getting to a review for Does Spring Hide Its Joy, I just want to highlight parts of an interview from The Guardian. They spoke with Kali Malone in January (when the album was released) regarding her search for the sublime. It is yet another window into the incredible mind of a stunning composer:
“Malone grew up mostly in Denver, where she sang in state choirs, studied classical vocal music, then discovered gigs age 13. “I was a very independent kid, with not so much supervision, and very adventurous,” she says. She moved to Massachusetts alone to study music, then boldly to Stockholm, aged 18, after becoming friends with Swedish avant-garde composer Ellen Arkbro. “I just knew I needed to go,” she says, “I was naive enough to arrive with just an amplifier and my guitar, but the first week I got a job, got my visa, an apartment – I somehow figured it all out.”
She studied electroacoustic composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music, where she found a fertile cohort including Arkbro, synth musician Caterina Barbieri and Maria W Horn (with whom she ran the label XKatedral) among others. Stockholm provided access to rare synths at EMS, and she began working as a technician at experimental venue Fylkingen (to sound poetry what New York’s CBGB was to punk). During this intense creative time, she made much of what became 2018’s Organ Dirges 2016-17 and Cast of Mind, and The Sacrificial Code: “I would roll all the microphones and mic stands across the building where the organ was every day,” she says. “I was the last one to leave school every night – I’d often get locked in.”
Malone’s organ fixation started when she interviewed organ tuner Jan Börjeson while studying. She began apprenticing with him, climbing inside the bellies of these mechanical whales. She was fascinated by their clacking, wheezing physicality, but also by the possibilities of tunings. “Holding down two notes, the beating patterns that then occur reminded me of what I was searching for in my electronic music,” she says.
She becomes visibly excited explaining the technicalities of how historical organs have been retuned through a process of harmonic standardisation. Grappling with terminology, I ask if this means some are essentially wearing clothes that don’t fit? “That’s a good way to put it,” she says, kindly. She elaborates about wolf tones and commas, and I am utterly lost. “I don’t understand why more people don’t know about harmonics,” she says. “We learn about chemistry, about colour – the science of sound doesn’t just apply to musicians – we experience sound every moment of our lives.”
She mentions a less sublime environmental sound. “There’s a leaf-blower that wakes me up every morning,” she says. “I remember once sprinting outside with my recorder because five guys were leaf-blowing together – it was one of the best sounds I’ve ever heard.” This is the mindset of a musician who is as much receiver as composer: “There’s so much beautiful sound out there – it’s all just your perception whether you experience it as music”.
I will wrap up with a review for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. This is what Pitchfork offered when they sat down and listened to one of this year’s most atmospheric and important albums. Even if it is not the sort of music you normally listen to, I would urge you to give it a try:
“Endurance is a longstanding element of Malone’s music, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy makes it a central component. Each of the three presentations of the piece featured on this release are an hour long (subdivided into 20-minute movements), and, anchored by a shared tonic drone, they easily melt into one sprawling three-hour epic. The music breathes in slow motion, with massive exhalations of bass ceding to stretches of quiet consonance before the next yawning gasp. Change is omnipresent and can be dramatic, but there’s a veneer of stillness that makes listening feel like observing the swirl of a nebula; the spectacle exists on a scale that’s difficult to grasp in one sitting. The most effective way to ground oneself in the piece is to be with the music as it exists in the moment, listening for incremental shifts as they unfold.
What Malone describes as “hold[ing] time together” involves a process of letting go of traditional musical demarcations of time and forming new ones. Drone music is often perceived to lack rhythm, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is abundant with it, just on different scales than many listeners might be used to. You can mark time with the moments when Railton runs out of bow and changes direction, which don’t occur at regular intervals. The constant ebb and flow of volume, intensity, and dissonance, which takes place in cycles of dozens of minutes, offers another rhythmic viewpoint. But the most fascinating occurs on a much smaller spectrum of time: As the trio builds up microtonal harmonies, warbling beats caused by harmonic interference contract and expand as the frequencies fall in and out of phase with one another. Depending where the listener’s attention rests, clock time, geological time, and quantum time each become observable.
This precise and harmonically dense requires superhuman concentration, and it’s clear from these recordings how closely the three musicians are listening and reacting to one another. Rather than conjure impressions of solitude, the spontaneous decisions the trio makes—to dig into coarse dissonance, to let the glorious simplicity of an open fifth ring out, to fade into oblivion—speak to the joys of building something collectively. In a recent interview with Bandcamp, Malone discussed how working on a score by Pauline Oliveros, the composer and Deep Listening pioneer whose methods were championed in 2020 as a balm for isolation, has affected how she thinks about working within and composing for an ensemble. Out of the singular nature of sustained tones emerge entire worlds of sound that arise from each member of the trio understanding not only their own role, but how to mold their contributions around the distinct personalities of their collaborators.
There’s something utopian about music driven by an attention to understanding those around you, music that pushes listeners to expand their understanding of how time is experienced and demarcated. In a period of upheaval, letting go of expectations of how things should be, beginning with how music should move or present itself, can be a powerful step toward reimagining the future. Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward. Just beneath the surface of Malone’s composition lies an alternate path forward: one that is malleable, defined by change and the mysterious complexities of sound”.
An incredible talent that should be known by all, I think we are going to hear a lot more singular and moving music from Kali Malone. Make sure that you check her out. I am not sure if she is going to be playing in the U.K. in the future, but she was here earlier in the month. If you can catch her performing, then I would definitely recommend it. Do go and immerse yourself in…
HER remarkable musical world.
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