You could describe Kali Malone’s sixth album as her most approachable to date, but it’s perhaps wise to give a bit of context if you do.
It is, after all, the follow-up to 2023’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which contained a grand total of three tracks – all versions of the same piece – and lasted over three hours. Featuring Malone playing a sine wave oscillator accompanied by cello and guitar, Does Spring Hide Its Joy was in itself substantially more approachable than, say, 2018’s Arched In Hysteria, a composition consisting of fearsome discordant tones overlaid with what sounded like the fizzing and humming of an amplifier on the fritz, or the same year’s compilation with a self-explanatory title, Organ Dirges 2016-2017. Her music operates somewhere on the border that separates modern classical – she studied electroacoustic composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music – from the world of avant-garde drone rock: her chief collaborator is Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, who’s also her husband. An interview with the Guardian in 2023 had her enthusing about overhearing the racket made by five gardeners all using leaf-blowers at the same time (“There’s so much beautiful sound out there, it’s all just your perception whether you experience it as music”).
Notice is thus served that Malone is unlikely to win a coveted slot on Spotify’s Hot Hits UK playlist in the foreseeable future. Her most famous celebrity fan might be Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – who interviewed her at length for a fanzine he put together in 2019 – but her oeuvre clearly speaks more to the wildly leftfield aspects of his taste than to his Glastonbury-headlining side.
By contrast to its predecessor, All Life Long clocks in at a relatively trim 78 minutes and features 12 pieces, scored for choir, brass and pipe organ – the latter ostensibly Malone’s primary instrument, but one that she hasn’t used on record for five years. Perhaps that’s a gesture of defiance: in France, Malone’s organ performances in churches have proved controversial, at least with a far-right “Catholic integralist” group called Civitas, who forced the cancellation of one concert in Brittany by occupying the church and threatening violence. But when you read her interviews, which are very much the place to go if you’re interested in the cultural contexts of 15th-century meantone organ tuning, it seems more likely she’s just fascinated by the instrument and its possibilities.
It’s tempting to wonder what the aforementioned religious integralists might make of the two vocal pieces on All Life Long, on which unaccompanied choir the Macadam Ensemble sound as if they’re performing a liturgy, albeit using Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Praise of Profanation and Arthur Symons’ 1901 poem The Crying of Water, from which the album also takes its name. Listeners with rock-trained ears, meanwhile, might expect a heavy metal band to strike up midway through each.
You can see why both the essay and the poem might appeal to Malone. The former deals with turning the sacred to secular use, while the latter’s depiction of the sound of the sea as an “unresting”, endless “mournful cry” could reasonably be applied to the sombre sound of All Life Long. The pieces for organ slowly shift and evolve as textures and harmonic patterns reappear across the album alongside moments of dissonance, although the latter are more fleeting and less extreme than in Malone’s previous work. She frequently resolves into one long, sustained chord, as on the trance-inducing No Sun to Burn.
The tracks using brass force you to consider the nature of the instruments themselves. The music is no less mournful in tone than the organ pieces but somehow feels more declamatory: the ghost of a fanfare clings to it despite everything.
Despite its minimalism, this is not music that feels dry or emotionally austere. There’s a genuinely affecting melancholy about Prisoned on Watery Shore, while Moving Forward invokes a kind of contemplative calm. It’s also music that feels strangely malleable. Listened to on headphones, at volume, the organ pieces can feel overwhelming and transportive, the slow motion at which they move sucking you in and temporarily obliterating the world outside. But played on speakers at a lower volume, they act as hugely effective ambient music, lending a contemplative chill to your surroundings.
On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.
This week Alexis listened to
Yaya Bey – Chasing the Bus
Taken from the Brooklyn R&B vocalist’s hotly anticipated new album Ten Fold, Chasing the Bus offers lyrical romantic discord set to music you can fall into: warm, slow, silky.
